Five Things People Don't Know About Me

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Omar tagged me to write up 5 things people don't know about me. Here we go:

  1. I have a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard. I've actually only had a few CS courses in my life... I've been programming computers since I was 9, but for some reason went into physics as and undergrad and biophysics for grad school. It took me longer than it should have to realize that computers are my passion. I joined Microsoft shortly after graduating from grad school. In grad school, I studied the salamander retina. You can read more about it here.
  2. I'm colorblind. I can't tell the difference between many shades of green and brown or between shades of blue and purple. It usually isn't a big deal. There are some video games that are harder, or just about impossible (Zuma gets really hard when they add the purple balls). I'm also not very good at reading those graphs that have dozens of colored lines and the legend that says what each one is.
  3. I'm a big fan of Oingo Boingo. Not many people outside of California have heard of them. Their most known songs are Weird Science and Dead Man's Party. The lead singer was Danny Elfman who has gone on to a career in movie scoring. He's done almost every Tim Burton film (except Ed Wood, which was during a period they had a falling out). I started an Oingo Boingo web site in 1994 on one the machines in our lab in grad school and having been running it ever since. I haven't put much time into the site in years, and it's pretty dated...
  4. I met my wife through my Oingo Boingo page! In about 1995 while I was still in grad school and she was in college in California, she got online and came across my page (she's a Boingo fan too) and she emailed me. We were married in 1997 shortly after I graduated and returned to California.
  5. I used to wear shorts all the time. I grew up in Santa Barbara and went to college in Southern California (Harvey Mudd). I wore shorts every day back then. When I went off to Boston for grad school, I lasted in shorts for a pretty long time, but eventually had to give in and wear some jeans. I had to do a lot of shopping :-) When I returned to California, I was still mostly a shorts guy. In Seattle, I actually wear long pants a good portion of the year.