Everything you ever wanted to know about me
I’m 18 (b. Jan 10, 1990) and was born in Mountain View, CA. I’ve lived in the SF Bay Area (San Jose, in fact) my whole life, save for the years 1995 to 2000 when I lived in Lowry Bay, New Zealand. I still call it home, but as of September 2008 I also live in Boston, MA, where I am attending Northeastern University and working towards (hopefully!) a dual degree in Computer Science and Music Technology.
I’ve been into tinkering with computers since I was six years old and my mother brought home a Power Macintosh 7100/66 from the offices of what was then Tandem Computers - they had been swallowed up by Compaq, so the office was going over to Windows and letting employees keep their old Mac workstations.
I’ve also been into music production and performance since around that time. Two friends from my school in New Zealand and I recorded a demo tape as “Speedzone”.
Fast forward to my high school years after returning to San Jose in 2000. My parents divorced around this time and my brother and I headed back there with our mom, while our dad headed off to Honolulu to run the University of Hawai’i Manoa Campus. I attended Harker, a smallish expensive non-religious but quite pretentious private school. While I don’t always have the kindest things to say about it (the words “police state” come to mind), I am actually tremendously appreciative of the opportunities I was offered and all the resources I had access to as a result of being there. It is in no small part the reason I get to be who I am today. I also went there for middle school, but we don’t talk about that.
During high school, both at Harker and outside it, my interest became skill sets and I had a blast collaborating with those around me to do all sorts of cool stuff. Besides hacking around on my own (modding Xboxes, rewiring my car, and the like) I’ve been actively involved in the local tech industry since 2005. I started out when I was 13 as the only IT person for a Gilroy print shop, but quickly transitioned to software development. Started out (as we all must) doing internal web applications for the likes of Pfizer (I didn’t write their mass mailer program, though, I swear) but graduated to working on embedded software which now lives in a wide variety of D-Link products at Ubicom.
In fact, my biggest extant connection to the Bay Area is my current job. I’m in charge of all aspects of bringing Kalexo’s Teamwork software to the iPhone, so I’m not only programming on the actual phone, but also adding requisite pieces to their extremely cutting edge distributed service back end. I work from Boston now but plan to poke my head into the office in Burlingame whenever I am home.
In high school I also ended up being very involved in all sorts of audio production. This let to my owning (and adoring) lots of shiny toys. You can hear some of what I did by searching “The Pizookies” or “Global Grooves 2008” on iTunes (Roonil Wazlib will also be up there eventually). I also did plenty of live recordings of school concerts and events, which I unfortunately can’t share with you all for copyright reasons. I pursued this professionally by doing occasional gigs with a variety of local production companies. In my senior year I sound-designed the school play and stage managed the musical. Along with a lifelong addiction to ClearCom headsets, this also earned me my school’s Technical Theater Certificate.
So, blogosphere, you’re meeting me as I’ve just finished one journey and am beginning another. Since arriving at Northeastern I’ve set up what I think is a pretty excellent little place for myself to live and met a girl with who I am more inherently compatible than I ever thought possible.
I’d say, so far, so good, but who knows what’s next? Stay tuned! Thanks for reading!
Some links you might find fascinating:
A blog I wrote about recording on the go in Italy
An extraordinarily nerdy podcast which I contribute to and engineer
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