About

About me

I grew up in Poway, California with a small, loving family. We come from humble means, and big heart.

My forbearers were financiers, merchant marines, civil servants, journalists, uranium prospectors, educators, tradesmen, and profound humanitarians forsaking all else. Every day I strive to live in their image, and to make them proud.

At age 5, I was diagnosed with stage four cancer, T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma. It was a long and difficult journey, but I was resolute. I was also very fortunate to have had access to an experimental treatment protocol and tons of family support. Five years later, I made it into long term remission.

By age seven, I was diagnosed with ASD (Autistic spectrum disorder, Aspergers Syndrome). Unlike my cancer diagnosis, this condition presented much longer term challenges. In school, I was an awkward child. I didn't have much interest in the same playground activities as my peers, preferring instead to stand in the middle of the playground, staring off into the sky and thinking. My parents would say that I was "born 40 years old", always working away on one project or another – my "inventions" I called them. It was at this point that my grandmother gave the family a Commodore 64, insisting that this would be an essential part of our future. This was where the story of my love affair with computers began, setting me off on my life long journey of learning and discovery.

All surfaces are imaginary

This statement was uttered matter-of-factly a few years ago by a brilliant coworker whom I respect very much. I'm uncertain if they meant it quite the way I heard it, but I was sufficiently gobsmacked by the profound implications of such a simple statement as to have adopted it as a sort of personal mantra, and way of thinking. In my view it holds true in many ways, literal and metaphorical:

• The facades we wear in social settings
• The way we conceptualize ourselves
• The nature of state, time, and the present
• The complexities of causation
• The nature of physical matter itself
• The rendering of a graph
• The slicing of a manifold into lesser dimensionality

Each of these surfaces is nothing more than a perception, ephemeral in nature, and in essence reified only by observation and imagination. When you begin to think of the world in a way where objective facts are imaginary and only stimuli are real, one can shift ones perceptions much more readily, and fairly toward a solution that fits better.