WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO CAL? I grew up in The Bronx, NY ("You got a problem with dat?" -- that's how they talked in my old neighborhood, no joke) until I was 9. The Bronx is one of the 5 Boroughs of New York City, if you didn't know. I moved to Westchester (suburb of New York) for a year and then upstate to a small town near Cooperstown, NY (where the Baseball Hall of Fame is located). I graduated from Cooperstown Central High, went on to MIT where I got a double major in CS and EE and graduated in 5 years. Then I came to Cal as a grad student, did a MS in Game Theory in 1995 and a PhD in Graphics in 2000 and joined the faculty in 2000. HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES)? I started with Basic in high school in 1985. At MIT I learned Scheme (in a class exactly like CS61A) and C. When I got to Berkeley, I learned Tcl/Tk, Java, Python, Unix, Matlab, Mathematica, html & perl. My current favorite language is Python, definitely. WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES? Most are listed on my website, but in short: puzzles, games, golf, basketball, ultimate, animation, juggling, programming, classic comedy sketches, movies, genealogy, sharing jokes and quality family time. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS? I can juggle 5 balls, ride a unicycle, spin things on my finger, play the harmonica and congas badly (though I can't read music), recite entire python sketches, hit a golf ball 275 yds, do an L hang, and wiggle my ears. HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU? In high school, I tied the school record in the 200m dash (23.2 s) and I was the fastest rapid calculator in central NY (~100 high schools). I recently lived in Melbourne, Australia for 5 months, and I climbed half-dome a few years ago. WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER? (again, links to most of these activities are on my website) I'm also teaching CNM190 ("Advanced Digital Animation") and the self-paced courses. That's a lot; I usually only teach two courses. I run the GamesCrafters computational game theory undergraduate research and development group. I supervise two awesome DeCals: UCBUGG and MS-DOS X. I'm the director of the Weiner Lecture Archives project. I'm working with Google and some ace undergraduates to incorporate parallelism into the lower division. I'm supervising two MS graduate students in CS Education, Jeremy Huddleston and Ketrina Yim. Jeremy is working on the curriculum development of CNM190, and Ketrina is building "Computer Science Illustrated", i.e., teaching CS through comics. I'm on the computing and networking committee, the undergraduate study committee, the college computing committee, and I do EECS and L&S faculty advising. I'm on the ACM Education Board and the chair of a task force that is trying to launch a new Web 2.0 collection of "Technology for Computing Educators". I'm also on the advisory board of BFOIT. I've got a 90-minute commute each way. Finally, and most importantly, I've got a wonderful wife and a 3-yr old toddler with whom I try to spend as much time as possible. Phew!