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My limited sense of self-preservation and excessive competitive spirit has led to a most entertaining sports career, while putting my surgeon's children, nieces and 2nd cousins through college. I've wrestled at the collegiate and national levels, appeared in a number of modern dance pieces, and done rugby tours of New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. I've become an Ultimate Frisbee fanatic over the past several years, including playing in the US Nationals and Worlds tournaments. Biking, hiking, white-water rafting: basically anything that involves risking life and limb for no pay is strangely appealing...
A convoluted scheme let me stay in university for the full decade maximum while working as a programmer for various groups on campus. Forced to graduate by the evil INS, my excursions into various faculties added up to a B.Sc. (General Studies), with minors in Ancient History, Modern Dance and English Literature. Ah, the golden years...
Press my distributed simulation button and I will happily geek out for hours on the scalability of virtual worlds and optimistic synchronization techniques. I can be found at science fiction conventions filking or busting the bank at the art show.
I'm always in the midst of a "how hard can it be to renovate this house and garden?" project, with surprisingly few trips to the emergency room.
I’ll play Go or Magic at the drop of a hat, and wistfully yearn for someone who still plays four-card majors.
Ingredients for a successful Sunday morning: Michelle (my belle), an old favorite book, and some random assortment of snoozing cats.
We really enjoyed our time in DC and Arlington, where we got involved in local community work, as well as starting our love of home renovation.
But we were both Beltway Bandits at the time, consultants to different research groups in the US government. Michelle was a communications and data consultant
to the EPA, and I was a research scientist for DARPA and NRL for various parallel and distributed computing projects. Our jobs had been fascinating and
challenging to start with. But eventually itchy feet set in, and we wanted to see what sort of different life we could create for ourselves. I wanted to
switch to the promising new massively multiplayer videogame industry, but all of the jobs appeared to be out on the West Coast. Michelle was an Army
brat growing up: moving from town to town was in fact expected and enjoyable for her; I was the wimp who didn't want to move! So even though I really loved living in Arlington, Michelle pointed out that there could easily be places is just as nice in California, and with the amazing climate, perhaps even better! I've always enjoyed the outdoors, and California has some spectacular scenery, not to mention
some nice wineries. So Michelle quickly convinced me and in 2000 we ditched our East Coast lives to set sail for San Francisco!
Michelle's goal was to finish her master's thesis and become established as a writer. My goal was to start my own company in the MMO game industry. We knew that it would take us several years to establish even the abilities to attempt those goals, but Michelle and are both very creative people, and we love to love our work. So for us it was worth the gamble to completely change our lives and our careers.
It's been several years now, and we still love our California life! We've achieved many of our goals, and created new goals, while growing as people
along the way. You can follow the links on this page to see how far we've gotten against our California Dream, and the stories by which we got there.
Enjoy!
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