WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO CAL? I spent half of my childhood in a low-income city called Downey, and the other half in a relatively high-income city called Cerritos. The move was not motivated by any sort of desire for social standing, it was made almost solely to increase the academic opportunities for me and my older sibling, and I'm thankful for it. I graduated from Whitney High School, the highest-ranked high school (by API score) in California. I decided to aim high, applying only to MIT, Olin, and the UC system (though I almost decided to apply to Stanfurd). I lucked out and was admitted to UC Berkeley in Fall of 2006. HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES)? I started with HTML in 1992, at the age of four, mainly through teaching myself through viewing source of webpages. I then decided to learn a 'real' programming language, and made the mistake of choosing Visual Basic. For the next three years, I could not understand the purpose of curly braces and the lack of 'endif' statements, and so Javascript remained a mystery until much later, when I realized my monumental blunder. Such are the perils of being self-taught, and living in an environment completely devoid of mentorship -- come to think of it, I don't think I met anyone remotely interested in programming until middle school, and all of my 'computer' teachers did was glorified typing practice or electronic babysitting with 'educational' games. Anyhow, I bought the game Max Payne in high school, only to break my arm soon afterwards. Though my bones were broken, my muscles were not, and I futilely attempted to play the game until at last I gave up and decided, at the very least, to make myself useful. I taught myself PHP and MySQL to code a webcomic site for a friend, and spent the next few years tinkering with scripts on-and-off, and making a few botched attempts to learn C and C++ (not realizing that the key to the languages were the libraries, I basically 'learned' the languages, but not how to make use of them). In my senior year of high school, the CS teacher retired, and me and a friend were given the chance to create an AP Computer Science curriculum and teach it. We decided to take a different route than the traditional process, which involved busywork and periodic tests, and replace it with a very project-based class, alternating between lecturing the students, allowing them lab time, and having interactive demoes where one of us (the instructors) talked about an API or a specific concept, and the other programmed on screen to demonstrate the concept. It was a fun class, and the grade distribution on the AP was mostly 5's, some 4's, and one 3 -- every student passed. As I entered college, I discovered Python, which remains my favorite language to date. I learned Scheme, which I grew to appreciate due to its simplicity and concept, and attempted to learn Ruby, which turned out to be entirely too messy for me to appreciate. WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES? I enjoy watching anime and reading manga, having watched a couple hundred series, old and new. However, that's just one part of my life, and I also do plenty of tinkering with OS X, Linux, and Windows, and playing random video games as time allows. Recently, I've taken up digital logic design, which is pretty spiffy, since you're working exactly at the level of the holy hardware-software line of abstraction (watch Dan's awesome CS61C lectures). I have enjoyed Lolcats for longer than they have been popular, meaning I also occasionally read the site that they originated from (for those of you in the know ;). WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS? I have a high tolerance for pain. I once broke my arm, and rather than crying out in pain, just thought "Shoot. I broke it AGAIN?" On the other hand, having a cavity filled with no painkillers is a pain far greater than any fracture can possibly be. Trust me, you never want to experience this. I also sometimes make random puns. People sometimes say that they stink, but I just say they're PUN-gent! *rimshot* HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU? Yes. WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER? I am taking three 4-unit classes, one of which I am helping to organize webcasting for, auditing CS184, TAing this class (of course), dropping in on MSDOSX (and checking out UCBUGG too, possibly), taking CS301, acting as the CSUA Secretary, and trying desperately not to procrastinate.