I am currently a stay-at-home dad to my wonderful foster son Draven. He's a handful but oh-so-much fun!
In April 2021 I got my Bachelor of Education in Elementary Education from the University of Alberta. I enjoy working with young people, so I may be seeking a teaching career in the future.
From November 2007 to December 2018, I was a programmer at BioWare, a division of EA. I worked on Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Anthem. I worked on visual effects, ambient artificial intelligence, user interface, and many other aspects of the games.
Before that, until June of 2007, I worked as a hardware verification engineer for AMD. I made sure the designs were correct before we went to the trouble of building the actual computer chips. I worked on the graphics processors -- I've always liked graphics and video games. :)
On October 24th, 2006, AMD acquired ATI. I had been working for ATI for over six years. During that time, I did hardware verificaiton among other things. I had a hand in virtually every ATI graphics card starting with the Radeon 9700. At the 2003 Game Developer Conference, I presented a Maya plugin I wrote for hardware accelerated previewing. I also helped verify the graphics chips for Nintendo Wii and Nintendo GameCube. Both are very cool systems, and I'm proud to have been a part of creating them.
In the summers of 2006 through 2010, I took leave from ATI/AMD/BioWare to work for iD Tech Camps. I worked as a camp counselor and instructor, teaching Video Game Creation, Game Modding, and 3D Game Design to kids and teens.
On April 4th, 2000, ATI acquired ArtX. I had been working there for about 10 months, doing verification for the GameCube graphics chip.
On June 11th, 1999, I graduated from the California Institute of Technology. While I was at Caltech, I spent my summers working as an intern at various companies around California. In 1998, I worked for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I pioneered a Java-based approach to GUI maintenance panels for the (eventually cancelled) National Ignition Facility.
In 1997, I worked at Wells Fargo. I worked in Controllers System Development, helping them port some reporting software to their intranet.
In 1996, I worked at RBI Software Systems. I worked on the LaserWriter 8 printer driver for Macintosh, implementing transparent images like those seen on the web. This was by far my favorite internship, not for the work, but for the environment. The company consisted of twelve programmers in one big room. The lack of partitions promoted interaction and joint problem solving. Everyone was friendly, and we would often go out to lunch together, and play network games after work.
In June, 1995 I graduated from Northgate high school. That summer, I was a TA for a programming class for high school students taught at UC Berkeley. I had taken this class myself, among many others during the preceding summers.
I received my Bachelor of Education, with distinction, from the University of Alberta. I value the knowledge and skills I gained, and will likely one day consider a career in teaching. I also discovered some pretty deep philosophical complaints I have with the education system as a whole, and find myself far more interested in the alternatives.
I received my Bachelor of Science degree, with Honor, in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology on June 11th, 1999. For those of you who know, I'm sure you'll understand when I say Caltech was a great place to have been. I must say, I received the best possible education from Caltech, but it was a lot of hard work, and a lifetime's worth of Hell. Is anyone keeping track of how many places on campus are named that?
Before all that, I went to Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, California. It took me a while to realize how good of a school Northgate really was. I didn't truly appreciate it until my struggling classmates at Tech told me they were valedictorians at their respective high schools, and I remembered that I didn't even rank in the top 10 percent at Northgate. I recall what excellent teachers I had in my Junior and Senior years at Northgate, and am glad.