Much to my chagrin, I was born in Houston, TX. After nearly seven years of heat, humidity and suburban sprawl, I prevailed upon my mom and then-step-dad to move to New York City (they didn't require much convincing, given that they had already decided to do so.).

Upon moving to NYC, I went to great pains to remove all traces of my accent, primarily to decrease the frequency and severity of the beatings at school. To this day, though, there are little reminders of my Texan heritance. Apparently I place the emphasis on "in" when pronouncing the word "insurance" as opposed to placing it on "sur" like a good north-easterner.

I went to middle school and high school at a small private school in Brooklyn Heights, and went to Brown University for the first of my undergrad degrees (more later on the plurality). I majored in Modern European History, played guitar in several bands, and drank.

My first year (1998-99) out of school, I taught in the computer department of my old high school. I taught a variety of classes, from 3rd through 12th grades, from programming to web design to desktop publishing. It was quite a learning experience, but one which I was not keen to repeat. I jumped ship after a year and joined the burgeoning dot-com boom, taking a job in the summer of 1999 as a web developer at a design shop in Gramercy Park.

What a magic time. The 70 hour weeks, the unreasonably high salaries, it still gives me shivers. Eventually though, the work (along with living in NYC) drove me slightly crazy, and I bolted for the West Coast. Riding the sinking dot-com magic carpet one last time, I took a job in the fall of 2000 at a software company in Silicon Valley, and moved to San Francisco.

I left the working world at the beginning of 2002, to pursue a second bachelor degree, this time in Computer Science. I still remember those bygone dot-com days, when the money flowed like a mighty river. It was a bubbling little brook by the time I started school again, or maybe a dried up stream, but I managed to find freelance work here and there to fund my educational jaunt. I completed my BS from UC Davis in June 2005.

In other news, I play guitar, listen to all kinds of weird music, and mess around with my computer. A lot. I'm working at TiVo now and living in Oakland. We'll see how that goes.