About Me...

I grew up on the New Jersey shore, living at my father's house during the school year and my mother's during the summer. The former was in Rumson, a pretty spiffy little town on a sylvan peninsula about halfway along the coast of the state. It was Parkway exit 109, but far enough from the Turnpike to not embody any of the horrible misconceptions about the state in general. My mother's place was a bit further south, in Loch Arbour, just a few blocks from the beach where I spent an inordinate amount of time, pretending to surf and burning myself to a crispy vermillion at least two or three times a year.

By the time I got to high school, I'd finally figured out how to make friends, and my parents were forced to share me, much to their dismay, I'm sure. When not playing cards, flying planes, windsurfing, water skiing, sailing, or playing midnight frisbee on the beach, we could usually be found at John's place, invaribly with ice cream, pizza, a bad movie, and given my choice, "something fruity" to drink. Go figure.

From high school, I went on to get my undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, an incredible school of commensurate beauty. A more arrogant institution that shall remain nameless (but might be mentioned in a subsequent paragraph) has been known to profess UVa to possess the only campus whose aethetics may rival those of its own. Regardless, it was an awesome place to be, academically, socially, and environmentally. I wallowed in the splendor of Mr. Jefferson's resort for four years, during the first 18 months of which I double-majored in architecture and engineering, believing this to be a practical thing to do. Unfortunately, it was also a somewhat insane thing to do, and so I eventually resigned myself to a lesser double major in two fields that at least bore some minimal resemblance to one another: computer science and aerospace engineering.

I then spent some time (like say... 4.5 years) in the Aero/Astro Department at Stanford, where I devoted a truly egregious number of hours to the generation of cool CFD (computational a.k.a. colorful fluid dynamics) images like this one. Well, sorta like that one. Actually, my research involved the development of a hybrid Navier-Stokes / DSMC particle method for simulating rarefied flow. Not that I expect you care.

After grajeeashun frum Stanfert, I decided to hang around the San Francisco Bay Area awhile longer and got a job with nVidia. After ten years in the Direct3D group, I have recently moved to a more architectural role. I could tell you more exactly what it is I'm doing there, but then I'd have to kill you.

Somewhere along the line, I managed to acquire a house in the San Carlos hills, around the middle of the San Francisco peninsula. Home improvement is like crack cocaine for me, but every now and then I do manage to put that aside long enough to spend some time with friends, head up to the city for a night out, or indulge one of my various other interests.

Long term, I'm not sure exactly where I'll be, though I might consider working for NASA or Disneyworld, and then would eventually like to teach. With the huge fortune I glean from the rapidly dissolving academic aerospace community, I will build my own mansion in which to live happily ever after with a family of four, a cat, a pipe organ, and a Foucault pendulum.

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