My Life

Early Years

I was Born Nov 9, 1967, in Summit NJ. I Grew up with my parents and sister Pam (who is 3 years older than me) in Warren NJ. Most of my relatives on my mother's side lived in Pennsylvania. My grandparents on my father's side also lived in NJ (in Lakewood) about an hour away from us. They lived in Rahway when my father was growing up. My father's sister lived in Mississippi with her family. I have many fond memories of visiting all these relatives during holidays and vacations as I was growing up.

My sister and I were always interested in producing artwork. My sister, Pam, has gone on to pursue a career as an Illustrator and graphic designer. She has an art gallery in Sedona, Arizona. You can see her art on the web.

When I was a child I remember playing army men and ball tag with some of my neighborhood buddies. Sometimes we would run around outside shooting each other with toy guns. We liked to hike around in the woods and go exploring. During the winter, we could walk on the frozen river in the back of my neighbor's house. Often the ice would break and we would fall into the river. This added to the fun. It was definitely a simpler time back then. There were only 2 genders, and there was no internet.

One of my fondest childhood memories is of building dams in the creek behind our house. My friends and I would wallow in the mud and use the clay from the riverbed to engineer elaborate aqueducts and dams. Sometimes we would release an upstream dam to see if a dam further down could withhold the torrent of water. So much fun. Afterward, we would have to hose off thoroughly before mom would consider letting us back in the house.

Some summers my hands would swell up and feel very uncomfortable. I had to hold them in a bucket of ice-water to get some relief. Benedrill helped a little. It must have been some strange sort of allergy. Fortunately, I outgrew it at some point before puberty.

My father was a structural engineer and my mother was a statistical programmer. I remember watching my mother use a teletype connected to a server when I was very young. My mother played lots of board games with me. She even helped my friends and I create casino games like roulette, so that we could learn about probability and why the house had an advantage.

Even though my parents had good white-collar jobs, we lived quite frugally. I don't think that we were ever poor, but my parents had a way of making us think that we were. In their childhood, they had experienced the effects of the depression era and it profoundly influenced how they lived. They were both on the same page when it came to spending money. Mostly they didn't. They took personal responsibility very seriously and went to great lengths to ensure that we would not ever have to depend on the government or anyone else for survival. My dad, in particular, was worried that the Carter era policies were going to have disastrous consequences. As a result, we stocked up on supplies and were very frugal. We worried about nuclear war a lot.

I can recall quite a few funny stories, from when I was growing up, which illustrate the great length that we went to avoid unnecessary expenditures.

• My sister and I cut all of our napkins in half so that we would have twice as many. A whole napkin is over-kill for most needs. We probably saved 10s of dollars by doing this over the years.
• We re-used tin foil as many times as was possible.
• We had a very large garden and grew most of our own vegetables. We canned vegetables for the winter. My sister and I were put to work in the garden. We weeded, watered, harvested, etc. It seemed like slave labor, but my parents worked much harder on it than we did.
• One year there was a Japanese beetle infestation. Instead of calling in professionals to take care of the problem, my sister and I were directed to go around to all the trees and pick off all the Japanese beetles and put them in jars that contained some gasoline. We killed thousands of beetles this way - perhaps as much as 1% of the total that were on our property. I wonder what we did with all those jars of beetles.
• We were directed to ignore the commercials that advocated using an inch long swath of toothpaste on your brush, and instead opt for just a microscopic veneer of the stuff. I'm sure that each tube of toothpaste lasted 5 - 20 times longer this way - adding up to many dollars in savings.
• We ate rabbits that my dad shot in the backyard. My mom even cooked a squirrel once, but only once, as it tasted like a rat, my dad said.
• Any excess fat or lard from meat was kept in a big jar for use in cooking later. I think my mom still has that jar. The lard at the bottom must be decades old. Nothing went to waste. We ate all leftovers.
• At Christmas time, when sending cards, we wrote on paper instead of the card, so that it could be reused. When wrapping gifts, we sometimes used newspaper. If we used actual gift wrap we were very careful when unwrapping the gift so that the wrapping paper could be re-used in following years.
• When we bought lox for bagels, we always got the lowest quality scraps. It had the tendons and other inedible parts mixed in. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found out what real lox was like.
• Another favorite food was scrapple. I think we got it because it was meat-like and very cheap. My sister joked that it was made from whatever was swept off the floor in the butcher shop.
• My parents kept a very strict budget and carefully recorded every single expenditure in a journal. Mom wrote programs in Excel to compute annual taxes rather than using Turbo tax.

High School

I had a few close friends in High School. I can remember playing games like Risk, Stratego, and Dungeons and Dragons. I read a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy books.

I discovered computers early in HS and spent many hours during the summer programming games of different sorts. My first computer was a TI99 4A with 16K of memory. It cost about $100 dollars and I hooked it up to my 13-inch black and white TV. I used it so much, I'm surprised it didn't wear out. One of the first games I made (sometime in 1983) was a city simulation game. You owned a medieval city and competed with neighboring cities. You allocated money to planting crops and buying weapons and other activities. There were a lot of parameters to adjust. You had to find the right balance to win. Much of my early programming was in Turbo pascal. My parents refused to buy me any computer games or game consoles, so I was forced to create all my games on my own. I am eternally grateful to them for depriving me of that short-term gratification. It is so much more satisfying to create your own game than play someone else's. Since my mother was a statistical programmer at Bell Labs, I found it easy to speak with her about math and the different programming projects that I took on.

My early programming projects were in BASIC and Turbo Pascal. When I got an IBM PC Junior around Sophomore year of High School, I read the whole BASIC manual, and created games like Mastermind, the city simulation, interactive adventure stories, and other simple things. With Turbo Pascal, I worked on projects like the graphical comparison of sorting algorithm performance, expression parsing into a binary tree, unbeatable tic-tac-toe, fractal generators, and lots of other things. I can remember thinking about what projects to create when I was at church service on Sundays instead of the sermon.

The martial arts have always fascinated me. When I was young I attended a Saturday adult school program for Karate taught by Sensei Karvel Thornber. Sensei Thornber was a physicist at AT&T Bell Laboratories; karate was his hobby. The style was Modified Ninja Isshinryu karate. It was actually a hodgepodge of a lot of things including Shotokan - I was to later learn. I don't think we learned any actual ninjitsu - that was probably thrown into the name to attract more students. His instructor was Joe Versoki. I started this program when I was in 3rd grade, and except for a few years, I continued with it until I graduated High School. When I first started, the instructor was Carol Tarantino. Sensei Thornber took over for her when I was in middle school. I would go very early in the morning and stay through all four classes and go home at about 1 PM on Saturdays. I learned lots of katas (most of which I have forgotten today). Around this time I read a book in the library called Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere. At the time there was nowhere around to practice it. This book was probably what caused me to seek and practice Aikido when I had an opportunity later.

I worked part-time during my senior year at a small life Insurance company called Hartstein Associates. I wrote a mailing list program for them in Pascal which they used for many years after I left. Most of the work I did for them was mundane data entry into Lotus and some envelope stuffing.

In June 1986 I graduated from Watchung Hills Regional High School in NJ. I was 6th in my class of 350. One of my best friends, Bill Keese, was valedictorian. We both took AP computer science with Mr. Momberg as seniors. It was a great experience. We both got 5's on the AP exam (AB version). This was the 3rd year it was offered by the College Board. In 2009 the AB version of the exam was dropped due to the low number of students taking it. The A version of the exam, which is what is offered today, has a reduced scope. It just covers the Java language, and lacks coverage of many algorithms and data structures. Years later, Bill and I would work at competing software companies (he at BroadBase/Kana, me at Blue Martini Software) in Silicon Valley. We saw each other pretty often from 1996 to 2002. We learned to play Go together in 1997 at the Palo Alto Go club, and continue to play each other regularly to this day - even though Bill moved to Japan around 2002.

High school was a pretty positive experience overall. I wish I had had the courage to date girls during that time, but that was something I didn't feel ready to do until much later. I had a lot of really great teachers. I remember when I was a freshman I got a C in the mid-level algebra class. Sophomore year I took regular Geometry. The teacher got pregnant at the start of the year, and a substitute taught the rest of the year. It wasn't good. Bill was in the honors class and told me stories that made me think that they were having a much better time in that class. In my junior year, I decided to take the honors trigonometry and pre-calculus class. We had a great teacher, Stanton Benson, and there were a lot of very bright students in the class. It changed my life. I did better and learned more in that class than I ever did in the "easier" classes I had taken previously. I would not consider myself a math whiz at all, but my eyes were opened to the wonder and challenge of mathematics as a result of these early experiences. I had similar positive experiences taking the honors computer science (Mr. Momberg), and calculus (Alice Richmond) classes in my senior year. I took many advanced placement classes and did quite well on the exams - saving my parents a lot of dough on college tuition by earning quite a few college credits. I never enjoyed humanities classes much, but I managed to muddle through them. Later in life, however, I've become quite interested in economics and its history.

College

I started college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in September of 1986. I majored in Computer Science and Mathematics. I lived on campus in the dormitories until my senior year when I lived with 2 other roommates, John Roh, and Michael Chun Pong Lam, in downtown Troy NY. There was one time, at that apartment, that I had to call 9-11 because someone was overdosing on drugs right outside our door.

I met a lot of interesting people here and generally had a good time. Everybody complained about the cafeteria food, but I loved it. I practiced a lot of martial arts during my college days in spite of having a 21 credit course load every semester and working 12 hours a week at the GE Research & Development Center in Niskayuna as an intern developing finite element models. My mentor there was a wonderful mathematician named Moyyed Hussain.

I went to Karate class on Monday. Wednesday, Friday, and Aikido on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. I also helped a friend teach Hapkido to kids once a week on Fridays. I went to karate tournaments occasionally.

Summers were spent either as a research assistant (RA) or Intern at GE R&D. It was during my first summer working as an RA that I met a great Friend, Rich Mohrmann, who introduced me to a lot of social activities outside of studying. He also joined the Karate club. I remember being so busy most of the time that I had to plan out every minute of every week on a sheet of paper that I carried around with me in my back pocket. I had trouble staying awake after eating lunch in the cafeteria. There was one class, complex variables, that was right after lunch in which I always fell asleep. I often sat in the front row, hoping that might help me stay awake. When it came time for the big exam, I remember the instructor saying to me as he handed me the exam "I bet you won't fall asleep today".

I have a lot of funny stories about my roommate John Roh. He was always doing strange things. I should make a web page just for him. He would sleep through all his classes all day and study all night. If he remembered to get up for a test he would ace it and ruin the curve for everyone else. He is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, yet was short on common sense. He had a pile of parking tickets in the back of his car which he never paid. The police actually used to follow him around campus. They added the tickets to his tuition bill and wouldn't let him graduate until he paid double the amount of the fines. He skipped gym class all semester one time and tried to make up all the gym classes for a semester in 2 days. We used to practice ninja training at night. Sometimes he would attack me at random moments to check my martial arts skills. He once hid in my closet and attacked me with an axe when I opened it. He was one of my best friends during college. He went on to become CTO of Hostway, web hosting company in Chicago, that he co-founded, and also became a professional poker player.

In May 1990, I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BS in Computer Science. I had a double major in math and computer science, but somehow I was a few credits shy of getting 2 degrees (I found out about this requirement at the last second). Fortunately, I was later able to transfer a few credits from graduate school and get the bachelors degree in math from RPI as well.

Graduate School

In June 1990, I started life as a student-employee at UC Davis at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. My adviser was Nelson Max. The summers were fun when there were lots of interns to hang out with and do waterskiing, river tubing, camping, volleyball, and other activities with. Winters were less exciting. Mostly I practiced at Aikido of Livermore where Jim Alvarez was the head instructor. Throughout my youth, I have been very active physically. As a result, I have had many close calls and near death experiences. I think my neck, back, and joints will always have some pain as a result of the activities I partook of in my youth. I have had 4 knee surgeries, two of them ACL replacements for my right knee.

My sister had arrived in California a few years before me and was living with her boyfriend in San Francisco. I occasionally went to visit them in the city. For a while, they lived in a loft in a huge warehouse in the SOMA area. They had some big parties, but it was kind of a seedy area. Pam's boyfriend, Dave, would often have to go out to the street and chase people away who were trying to break into cars.

I went to martial art seminars, and on Sundays often went to Sunday sparring in Oakland. It was held first at a Kajukenbo school and later at Baker's Tae Kwon Do. For just 2 dollars, you could fight complete strangers with unknown backgrounds and varying experience. I met a lot of very interesting people at these gatherings - all of them great. There were a couple of times I felt very bad for using excessive contact. Fortunately, I survived these experiences.

In December 1992 I graduated from UC Davis with an MS degree in Computer Science. Also, at this time, I got another BS degree in mathematics from Rensselaer. I spent one quarter at UC Davis to take some classes not offered at the UC extension in Livermore. I presented the results of my masters' thesis Smooth Transitions Between Bump Rendering Algorithms at SIGGRAPH 93.

Adulthood

It was at the Fremont dojo that I met my wife and her wonderful family. I met Shanna in Oct 1992. Her full maiden name is Shanna Thanh Thi Trang Nguyen. For our first date, I took her and a bunch of her nieces and nephews to see the movie "Aladin" in Milpitas. We went to Fresh Choice afterward. It was an interesting dinner conversation since she barely spoke English at the time. We went to aikido and 24 Hour Nautilus together for a while. Her mom wasn't thrilled about me dating her at first but eventually came around. I was later told, however, that I became one of her favorite son in laws. Shanna is one of 8 sisters and 4 brothers. At the time most of them lived in the bay area.

On November 22, 1997, I married Shanna. We had a simple wedding with just her mother, one sister (Truc), a niece (Vivian), and my best friend (Bill Keese). I told my parents on the phone that we were going to get married a few days before, and announced it to the rest of the family at Thanksgiving.

On April 20th of 1999, we had our son, Brian. Brian James Becker has been a joy beyond words. I cried at his birth. I am creating this website and journal largely so that he can know more about where he came from. We are surprised and entertained by Brian every day. We love him so much. Shanna had a smooth pregnancy, but a difficult birth. Brian was a bit uncooperative coming out and needed to be delivered by cesarean at 5:14 AM on April 20, 1999. Brian took his first steps when only 10 months old.

In 1998, I learned to become a reading tutor through a library program. For about 8 months in 1998, I was a reading tutor for an adult who had not yet learned to read. This was an interesting and challenging experience. It is really hard for me to imagine going through life without knowing how to read, but a surprising number of adults are in this situation.

On Dec 10, 2001, we paid off the mortgage on our Mountain View condominium. We were finally debt free! (for a few years anyway). Over the 8 years of living in our condo, we had replaced nearly everything in it: carpet, paint, curtains, blinds, bathroom grout (which I did myself), dishwasher, refrigerator, microwave, stove, and oven. We even got new power-flush toilets (from Toto). When we replaced our oven, they took too much out of the counter, so they had to replace the counter top too.

On November 22, 2002, Shanna and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. We had been together for 10 years.

July 2004. We just moved to a new home in Union City in March. Now we are back in debt, but with a larger house. It has 2400 square feet as opposed to 1100 that the old condo (where we lived for 8 years) had. It even as a pretty sizable back yard - something we could not afford if we stayed in Mountain View. Union City is in the east bay just above Fremont. One of the first things we did was replace the window trim - which had some evidence of dry-rot, and replace the toilets with those wonderful Toto toilets.

In September of 2008, the combination of overbuilding and overbuying finally came to an end with the bursting of the housing bubble. The effects rippled through the US economy and the world. The government passed a 700 billion dollar package to buy distressed mortgages. Not surprisingly, none of the money was actually used to buy any mortgages. Instead, it was mostly used to buy stock in failing financial institutions. It was overspending by consumers and the government that got the nation into the mess, I'm concerned that the bailout - which just gets added to the national debt - will eventually need to be paid back when some future, larger crisis hits. To really understand the source of the financial crisis, I recommend reading The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure. Over the years I have been very disappointed in how our government spends taxpayer money. I don't think the government should ever spend more than it collects in taxes. It was around this time that I decided to become a libertarian. I would like to see a smaller more decentralized government. States should have autonomy in most matters, and the Federal government should be more limited.

In October of 2008, I took a break from aikido for a bit so I would have some time to catch up on some other pursuits. We began filming our Alien movie, but unfortunately, 20th Century Fox did not give us permission to do a remake of their 1979 movie, Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerrit. That puts a damper on our efforts, but I think our production will be covered under fair use if we take the approach of creating a parody. Well, this eventually became a moot point, as all the actors grew up too fast during the filming. you can watch the trailer for it, however.

Around 2008, I started getting involved in our gated community's HOA. It was during a particularly contentious time. There were lots of heated debates at board meetings as there were two warring factions among board members. People seemed to be upset about a lot of seemingly small things, like speed bumps and front gate security. A couple of other tech-savvy residents and myself put together an online survey to help resolve some of the issues. We also created our community website using Joomla. Later, when the arguments died down, it was less interesting, so I stopped going to the meetings.

We did several no-cost refinancings of our mortgage during this time as rate dropped significantly after the 2008 financial crisis.

I returned to aikido occasionally, but my knees were starting to feel a little used up. It was reluctant to give it up since it was such a big part of my life for so long. I actually did start practicing aikido more frequently starting in 2017 - at Hayward Aikido, and then with Isaiah Fernandez at Dragon's Den close to my how in Union City.

From 2006 on, I build my own computers rather than buying them pre-built. I don't think I save any money doing this, but it's a fun project to work on with Brian and my nephew, Duy. Duy used to work at Fry's and has a lot of experience building computers that he shares with us.

In 2009 we turned in our Isuzu Rodeo that was still running fine, after 15 years of reliable performance, as part of the "cash for clunkers" program. We got a new white Prius. I was very happy with the 54 mpg that it got. Still happy with the Prius in 2019, after 10 years. We bought a Garmin GPS. This was before we had smartphones.

Read the Hikaro no Go manga comics and started playing go more. I've gained a lot of wisdom from playing go. Continued practicing aikido. Started connecting with old friends on Facebook.

In 2010 I got Lasik and said good-bye to glasses and contacts. The surgery was performed by Dr. Shoba Tanden. She did a great job. It cost $5k at the time, and was well worth it. I could see better after the surgery than I ever could before with glasses or contacts, My eyes have a little dryness now, but the dryness was worse when I was using contact regularly. I missed only one day of work after the surgery. It is so liberating to no longer be dependent on glasses or contacts. It is truly a miraculous surgery. Going camping, practicing aikido, and so many other things are so much more enjoyable now.

In 2011 we took a trip to Vietnam for 3 weeks. Part of the time we stayed with one of Shanna's brothers in Bien Hoa. The rest of the time we took various tours. I had never been out of the country before, and this trip helped to broaden my cultural awareness. Vietnam is a beautiful country, with very nice friendly people, but for some reason, everyone grew up thinking it is OK to just throw your trash wherever. As a result, there are piles of trash everywhere. Even at the beach the water and sand are full of trash. There is also a lot of poverty. Everyone seems to have their own little business of selling peanuts or lottery tickets. I guess if you make a business that is too successful, the government will come and take it away from. There are no traffic rules. Everyone just goes when they can go. Crossing the street took some getting used to. You have to pay to use the bathroom in a public place, and it's not a nice bathroom. I guess that explains why so many would rather just do their business in the street.

In 2012, John Roh, Duy, and I all got expensive compound bows and learned to shoot arrows at targets. We still go occasionally, but not too much. Duy still does it regularly with his friend Kevin.

At Brian's request, we adopted our cat Percy in 2012. What a wonderful cat he has been. So loving and affectionate. He gets his name partly from the Thomas trains Brian used to play with, and partly from the fact that he is so quick to Purr.

In 2013, the NHUSD school district won a 30 million dollar race-to-the-top grant to bring technology into the schools. I was part of a committee to help decide how a small part of that money should be spent on hardware. We decided to purchase Chromebooks for all students. The lions share of the money was used to add more staff and do staff development.

In 2014, I created a TutorMatch application to help match students in need of tutoring with other students proficient in the subject matter who were will int to tutor. I thought it was a great idea, but unfortunately, I could not convince the high school administration to adopt it. They did not trust the students to do their own matching. It was developed, in part, in collaboration with some computer science club students. I still hold out hope that some high school will discover it on GitHub and adopt it for their use.

I spent a lot of time programming for fun in my free time, even though that is what I did for my day job. My progression of computer languages was Basic, Pascal, C++, Java, Javascript, Actionscript/Flex, Python, Scala. I also programmed in Fortran, Lisp, and C, but never for fun. I love Scala. Besides its nice functional features, it's like a better Java. It is hard to go back to Java after programming in Scala. I like it so much that I ported all of my personal projects from Java to Scala over the course of a year. It was not too hard to do because Scala is interoperable with Java, and the Intellij IDE provides some nice support for doing the initial conversion. I'm surprised that C++ is still as popular as it is. I don't think its performance is enough to compensate for all the ways that you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.

Some other games I implemented were: Galactic Empire (send ships our to resource producing planets, while defending from other players and the computer), MasterMind, Checkers, Go-moku/Pente, Conway's game of life, and many others. Besides games, I have also implemented many puzzles and simulations. Some of these projects I originally wrote in Pascal in the 90's, then rewrote in Java in the 2000's, and now rewrote again in Scala in the 2010's. All the while I add new ones while enhancing the old ones. It's always interesting to see how I can make the frameworks more general and reusable. I have an optimization library that is used by the game programs to play better, and by the puzzle and simulation projects to search for optimal solutions. Another project I hope to get to someday is building virtual artificial creatures using genetic algorithms as Karl Sims did in his landmark 1994 SIGGRAPH paper.

In June 2015 we took a trip to Yellowstone Park with the Doan family. We had a great time hiking, fishing, seeing geysers, and exploring. The most memorable moment, however, was when our raft overturned in the rapids going down the Yellowstone River. We were all thrown from the boat and had to rescue each other as we were trained to do. Brian says that he was caught in a vortex and kept doing somersaults under water.

In 2016 I volunteered for The Village Method at Alvarado Middle School even though my son was no longer a student there. It was an interesting experience, but I don't think I made much of an impact.

Net neutrality was repealed in 2017 and the world did not end.

In 2017, I founded the Union City Go Club. I used an account on meetup.com to get the word out initially, but eventually canceled that in favor of a free web forum. It was surprising how many people join the group on meetup.com, but then never came. And there were others that RSVP'd but then never showed up. For the first few months, there were a few days when I just sat there reading a book and no one came. Things gradually picked up though. We really turned the corner when Austen Liao (3 dan) joined and brought some of his other high school friends. We now have a thriving club.

In July of 2017, the 3 of us traveled to Peru and hiked the Inca trail to Machu Pichu with John Roh. Afterwards, we stayed in a remote resort on the Amazon river. We fished for piranha, petted a sloth, and wrestled an anaconda. Brian will be able to tell his grand-kids that he went for 3 days without an internet connection. John got poked by a prickly thing in the jungle and almost had to have his arm amputated.

Career

In Jan 1993 I started working as a full-time employee at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I co-authored many research papers during this time together with Nelson Max and Roger Crawfis. We had a fun time developing new techniques for scalar and vector field visualization. The field was new and we had more ideas than we could implement. It was a 3 year internal research project. At the end of that time, I could continue employment at LLNL or look elsewhere. I didn't spend much time interviewing. I was recruited by Mario Schkolnick to join the newly formed MineSet group at SGI.

In October 1995 I started working at Silicon Graphics Incorporated in Mountain View CA (before they changed their name to SGI - Servers, Graphics, Insight). At first, I commuted from Fremont, but after a few agonizing months of that, I decided to buy my first home. I bought a condo in Mountain View for $145k (In 2019, that same condo would be worth close to $1 million). For over 4 years my commute was a 10-minute bike ride. MineSet was an exciting project and I worked with a lot of smart people in the group. There were MineSet reunion dinners for years afterward. I would have been really surprised to know then that I would return to working on the project again 15 years in the future.

In 1998 SGI started to stumble badly. Our group was never affected by layoffs, but attractive opportunities elsewhere in the valley lured many of the veteran members away in 1999. I remember telling Ed Karrels that options worth 0.1% of the company did not seem like much - as he went off to become a very early employee at Google. I was the last of the long-time engineers to leave. MineSet was developed for several years more at SGI after I left. A whole new group of engineers had been hired to work on it. Eventually, however, it was sold to Purple Insights around 2002, and later was acquired by Vero Insight.

In October of 1999, I took a 6-week sabbatical from work (this is one of the benefits of working at SGI - you get 6-week sabbaticals every 4 years). We spent 2 weeks in Texas with Shanna's sister's family, and 2 weeks with my parents.

On January 17, 2000, I started working at Blue Martini Software, an exciting e-commerce startup. We had a real roller coaster ride. In less than a year, the number of employees went from under 100 to 600, and the stock went from $1 to $77. Then the dot-com bubble burst and the urgent demand for this type of software dropped dramatically. Many of our customers were dot-coms that went bankrupt. We had 2 rounds 30% of layoffs and several smaller ones. The stock went back down to $1. It was a tough time. I was foolishly optimistic about the company's future while I worked there. We had a great product and Java-based architecture. I just couldn't see how it would fail with such a great team working on it.

In March or so of 2001, the MineSet project at SGI was finally shut down. All the ex-team members got together for a requiem dinner to memorialize the project. It was good to see everyone gathered together again one last time. That is not quite true. We were together for reunions quite a few more times in the following years. Then 12 years later, in 2013, Christian Tanesescu resurrected the MineSet project again. He approached me while I was working at PROS to help him restart the project. Initially, I told him no, but then a year later, I decided to join the team that he was building.

In September 2001, I started getting serious about my hobby of writing a computer Go program on my computer. The Go-moku program I have posted on this site was just a warm-up exercise. I also implemented checkers and chess as a warm-up. Both are nearly unbeatable by humans in my opinion. The checkers game was very easy to implement once I have the overall infrastructure in place. Go turned out to be much difficult. I eventually created something that sort of played, but when AlphaGo came out in 2017, I had to give up entirely. I have made some small contributions to Leela-zero - which is a faithful open-source implementation of the AlhpaGo zero paper.

In September 2002, we had another big layoff at Blue Martini. Our 5th in the last 7 quarters. It was a difficult time. We all hoped the economy would turn around soon.

I did not get laid off from Blue Martini, but I decided to quit in 2004. I joined a startup company called Metreo in Palo Alto. I took 2 weeks off between jobs to spend time with my family and work on an XML based aikido technique builder application. Went to the visualization conference in Austin at my own expense this year. Brian was a vampire for Halloween.

At Metreo, I worked with the chief software architect, Hannes Marais, on a next-generation pricing application called Vision. I worked on a number of new pricing specific charting components in SVG. In the summer of 2005, Hannes developed an incredible home-grown Ajax framework that allowed us to make tremendous progress in a short time. Unfortunately, the company ran out of money before we could really leverage the new technology that he had created. I stuck it out to the end when we were all laid off in early January of 2006. Hannes went off to work by himself on software that would later be the basis for a new company called Kalexo that was later sold to AutoDesk.

I interviewed at a number of companies, and after considering a number of offers (including one from Google), decided to accept an offer from PROS in late February 2006. PROS is located in Houston, so I got to work from home in California, and visit Houston once a quarter or so. At PROS, I worked on a pricing analytics application that is not too much different from what we built at Metreo. One exciting aspect is that at the beginning of 2007, we decided to start porting the UI to Adobe Flex. However, by 2013, that decision to port to Flex was starting to look like a bad decision because the browsers started dropping support for Flash. That meant porting back to some javascript framework. When I visited Houston I practice aikido at Shobu dojo.

Once a quarter or so, I would fly out to visit PROS in Houston for a week. This usually coincided with planning for the next major software release. It was really nice working from home most of the time. Flying to Houston and staying at a hotel and eating at nice restaurants always seemed like a vacation in many ways.

In 2014, I decided to resign from PROS and join SGI to work on Mineset again. During the next 4+ years, we completely rewrote Mineset. Not a single line of original C++ code remained. The C++ client code was replaced by Java, Javascript, and HTML. The backend MLC++ code was replaced by Scala and Apache Spark. When I first joined, we spent a lot of effort trying to come up with a new name. The end result was that it should be called "Mineset" instead of "MineSet". In early 2016, SGI sold Mineset Inc to ESI-group, right before SGI was itself acquired by HP. We continued to work on Mineset at ESI for several years, until March of 1019 when they decided to cancel the project and lay off the team. It was sad, but not entirely unexpected. We were never able to generate the sort of revenue with it that we had hoped.

In 2015, I created an Android app called Mapland. It was supposed to be a joint project that Brian and I could work on together, but I did most of the work. It was interesting to see all the powerful hosted Google services that were available and to learn the Android API.

In April 2019, I joined the team at ThousandEyes as a principal engineer. They produce visualization that helps the wold understand where the problems are in the global internet. In March of 2020, right after our company kick off, where empoyees flew from all over the world to San Francisco for planning and team building, the Coronovirus hit. Shanna, Brian, and I are all locked down at home. We consider ourselves lucky because Brian can do his schoolwork remotely, I can work remotely, and Shanna's job in medical device manufacturing is considered essential.

Raising Brian

One of my most joyous experiences was hearing him laugh for the first time. He was about 3 months old. Shanna had him on her shoulder, and I was playing peek-a-boo with him. He laughed and laughed. He laughed a lot like that until he was about 14 years old, then abruptly stopped. His first word was apple.

Brian at 3 years old was an absolute joy (and frustration). He was talking quite a bit. It was mostly nonsense, but cute. He liked to pretend to read books out loud - making up the story as he went along. We got him several more Thomas trains for X-mas - something he desperately wanted. We got him a bicycle for his 3rd birthday, but he didn't like to ride it much yet even though he is able to. At 3 1/2 we enrolled him in the Kumon school for math tutoring. Mostly he did connect the dot exercises and counts things up to 20. For more details on his milestones see Brian's Homepage.

We were at the park in the summer of 2002 when Brian gave us quite a scare by running off. I was on the playground with him at Lake Cunningham Park. We went there to have lunch after a visit to Raging Waters. I saw him go down the slide, and I thought he was circling around to come back up. What he really did, however, was circle around and keep on running in the opposite direction. We could not find him anywhere for about 15 minutes, and we were starting to get really scared. Shanna searched the public restrooms and nearby picnic area, while I jogged in the other direction asking people if they had seen a lost 3-year-old. I finally found him a few hundred yards away. A soccer player had found him crying and was walking him back toward the playground. We tried to explain to him that he should not run off like that, but I'm not sure he got it. There was another time that Shanna recalls. He came out of the condo on his own, in his PJs, and ran around in the rain looking for his mother when she had gone to get the laundry from the laundry room. She was really surprised to see him running around outside since she was just gone for a minute.

February 2003. Brian (almost 4) reached many big milestones. We were really proud of him. He could count and write numbers up to 100. He could sing songs and dance really well. He created his own songs and dances. Until then, I had concentrated more on numbers than letters, but now we are practiced writing the letters in the alphabet, and playing simple games like hangman, mazes, dots-and-boxes, and tic-tac-toe. He is amazing to watch on the computer. He is using it like a pro even though he can't read! He plays all the games on the Lego and other kid's websites. He started being interested in Legos around this age or shortly after. When Bill and I played go, it was very difficult to keep him away from the stones. He would keep trying to eat them.

Brian gets along with all his classmates at the daycare center and plays with them for hours at the playground afterward. We noticed that he plays with the girls more than the boys. He has an imaginary friend called Chucky Mouse that is usually with him everywhere he goes. Brian blames Chucky Mouse for all the bad things he does. Brian never had a problem wetting his bed. For a while we made him wear diapers at night, but since they were never wet in the morning we no longer bothered. At 4, he gets up in the morning and goes to the bathroom all by himself.

Brian at 5 was progressing wonderfully. He could swim and we went to the pool often. He progressed through all the levels at the Happy Fish Swim school - starfish, jellyfish, ... porpoise, shark, etc. After doing that he was ready to join the Newark Bluefins competitive swim team when he got to middle school. He read reasonably well and could do basic multiplication. Grandma and Grandpa Becker visited every July. They got a fish for Brian. He named it George. Blue Martini announced a bad quarter. Worried about impending layoffs. George died 10 days after we got him. In hindsight 2004 was not the best time to buy a big house, but at least it was better than buying in 2006.

Working at home during the 8 years I worked for PROS, gave me more time to spend with my family. Brian was then in the 3rd grade. I saw him when he first wakes up, and I saw him when he comes home from school. I still tried to give him occasional math lessons, but he did not always appreciate my efforts. Every night I read books to him for at least half an hour. Among the books I have read to him are the Hobbit, the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, Bored of the Rings (a parody), Everything I Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Enders Game, the first three of the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen R Donaldson, and many more. Each book could take a few months, but it was an enjoyable process. I thought that by reading to him it would somehow encourage him to also become an avid reader, but the results seemed mixed. He still preferred video games to reading.

Just as I played a lot of games when I was young, I played a lot of different games with Brian as he grew up. When he was very young, we did tic-tac-toe, 5 in a row, hangman, jigsaw puzzles, Lego, Pyraos, Pictionary, hide and seek, Mind-trap, and others. When he was a little older (around 6 - 11 years), we played some more advanced games like Monopoly, Risk, Abalone, Go (of course), more Mind Trap, Trivial Pursuit, Dungeons and Dragons, Stratego, Yugi-Oh, Magic the Gathering, Settlers of Catan, and many others. In all the times that we have played Settlers of Catan, I can't recall a time where he did not win. His sense of strategy is very sharp. I did not like Yugi-Oh or Magic cards, but he was really into it. Trading Magic cards became a big hobby of his as an older teenager.

There was a period of several months where we were very into playing Monopoly. It got to a point where we played very fast and made up lots of crazy rules to make it more interesting. Some of the variations that we tried were

• Have all the properties cost twice as much as their listed price.
• Earn a percentage of your cash on hand when passing go. This was a good way to learn about the power of compound interest.
• If you ran out of money, allow paying debts by doing push-ups or sit-ups. You could get 1 dollar per push-up or for 2 sit-ups. At first, he was the one getting all the exercise, but as we played more, and he got a lot better than me, I can remember getting very sore from all the push-ups and sit-ups.
• Starting the game with 500 dollars instead of the 1500 dollars prescribed by the rules.

Playing Monopoly was such a great way for kids to learn simple math. We played quickly and hyper-competitively. I wasn't easy on him, and I paid the price for that when he got much better than me and crushed me most games. When Pam and Grandma visited and played Monopoly with us, they were a little surprised by the manner in which we played. Over time, the only game he couldn't beat me at was go.

In November 2009, I learned to roller skate - forward and backward. It wasn't really something that I wanted to do, but Brian kept asking to go roller skating. We would go, pay our $20 for the afternoon and then skate. He would get tired of it after about 1/2 hour, but I didn't want the expense to go to waste so I would end up skating for the rest of the day while he whined about wanting to go home.

In December 2009, I made an HDTV antenna out of coat hangers for my PlusTV PCI cards so I can watch HDTV on it. I still use the same coat hanger antenna for TV reception in 2019. We started with Netflix around 2009 and that used up quite a bit of time too. Brian and I have had the lego Mindstorms spread out in the living room for months. He made a cool shooter robot, and I created a holonomic drive. Later I also made a robot that could balance on 2 wheels.

Brian started taking Kajukenbo at the Dragon's Den in May 2008. I signed up for the open mat program that they had. I would work out with the weights and watch him for his class, and go in on Saturday and hit the punching bags or workout with whoever showed up that day. I also went to Friday open sparring a few times at Dragons Den. It was very much like the old days when I did it at Bakers Tae Kwon Do in Oakland. People from all over, with different martial arts training, would come together to beat the stuffing out of each other for a very small fee. I remember fighting one guy, who would keep picking me up and throwing me on my head whenever I would try to launch an attack on him. Fun, but I already felt I was getting too old for that sort of thing.

Another fun experience was boxing with Nicolo Noche one Saturday during open mat. We wore full head-gear and regulation boxing gloves and pummelled each other. It was fun until after I got hit in the head a few times. Then I quit. I figured that I still might have some more use for my head and the brain that it contained. No more boxing for me. Nico was a really wonderful guy. Always offering to train me on Saturdays, even though he was under no obligation to do so. I was shocked to learn that he died unexpectedly a few years later at age 35 while teaching a class in 2016.

Brian had started out at Hernandez martial arts. I withdrew him from that when I found out that they required signing a contract for at least a year at a time, and at a cost of thousands of dollars. Also, they did not allow any contact when sparring - which I thought was a bit too constrained. I liked the old-school approach of Dragon's Den much better, but I guess it proved a little too rough for Brian. He quit after six months or so. I can't blame him. It was my thing, not his. His thing is swimming, and he is very good at it.

We have a large pool in our community, and while Brian was growing up, we would go swim in it a lot. Sometimes we would race. Of course I could beat him easily at first, but as he became an expert swimmer, I did not have a chance. He swam competitively first for the Newark Blue-fins, then for CDST (California Dolphin's Swim Team) and for the James Logan Varsity swim team. He is on record as being the fastest free-style swimmer in Jame's Logan High School's history. I have seen him do some amazing things in the pool. The pool we have is junior olympic size (25 meters I believe). He could do 3 laps underwater without taking a breath. He could do 2 laps before I could finish one. We tried different ways of handicapping him to make the race more fair (like he could use only hands or just feet) but he still won. He has given me some swimming lessons so that I could be a better swimmer. He took training so that he could be certified as a life-guard, and coaches swimming with CDST some summers.

When Brian was in 3rd grade, I introduced the Scratch programming language to his class. I also remember talking about some simple mathematical proofs on another occasion. When Brian was in 4th grade, I volunteered to help out with the after-school math league program at Pioneer elementary school. Because of budget cutbacks, there was no funding, so I am made up all the material. Fortunately, Ms. Cheung volunteered her time and classroom so that the whole thing became possible. In fifth grade, I did a similar Math Olympiad program in Ms Kochar's room. These programs were part of the GATE (Gifted And TalEnted) program. I thought the GATE program was a good idea, but it was later abolished, either for lack of funding or because those concerned about equity believed that certain minority groups were too underrepresented.

In 2010, Brian started at Alvarado Middle School (today it is known as Itliong-Veracruz Middle school). The teacher for his 6th-grade math class fell ill at the start of the year and there was a substitute for the first half of the year. I wasn't happy about that, but there was not much that I could do. Fortunately, he was still taking Kumon and learning algebra and other concepts that were more advanced than they allowed him to learn in school. I tried my hardest to find a teacher who would allow me to use their classroom after school and volunteer to lead a math program for interested students. I tried unsuccessfully for months to do this. I was directed to one teacher, who I will not name, that kept leading me on saying that I could start shortly, after such and such was done, but the start date kept getting pushed out. Eventually, the teacher just told me it wasn't going to happen as she was busy with something else. That was the only year for what was would have been 11 consecutive years that I was not able to do an after school program for the students.

When Brian was in 8th grade at Alvarado Middle School, the administration asked parents to come in during career day and speak to the students about their careers. Apparently I was the only one willing to come in and speak, so they canceled the event. It was disappointing, but I have the speech that I prepared for it.

Brian skipped algebra in 7th grade. He was able to take the final exam and demonstrate that he knew all the material. He learned it from Kumon, and perhaps from me. So in 7th grade, he took geometry instead. In 8th grade, he did not take any math at school, because the only alternative offered by the school system was for us to drive him across town to the high school to take algebra 2. That would have been a lot of wasted time driving each day, not to mention the inconvenience. Instead, he took Algebra 2 through EPGY. He did in 3 months (working only 1/2 hour per day) what the high school did in a whole year. I know that he learned the material too because he took the mid-term and final exams for the Algebra 2 course at the high school and did very well on both. The EPGY model seems much more effective than the public school system approach. It was self-paced and mastery based. Brian continued with Kumon until level K before finally giving up in frustration. It became quite tedious. At this stage, continuing with EPGY made more sense than Kumon.

The process by which students are allowed to skip course or grades is not well-defined. The administration is very reluctant to allow students to skip grades or courses because it leads to scheduling problems and administrative headaches. Everything works well if all students proceed at exactly the same rate in all subjects. Unfortunately, students have widely varying interests and abilities. I look forward ot the day when public school instruction is more mastery-based than grade-based, more self-directed than tracked, and more self-paced rather than age-paced. I like the model for 42 Silicon Valley. They do everything we discussed wanting to do at district race-to-the-top meetings but never made much progress toward. Unfortunately, it seems that the pandemic killed 42 Silicon Valley - which relied heavily on in-person gatherings.

Brian took other classes through EPGY as well. For the most part, they went really well. There were 2 computer classes that he took. The first was quite easy and he did quite well. The second was exceedingly difficult, and he would not have gotten through it without some help from me. When he got to high school, he was pretty well prepared for math. He took trigonometry and pre-calculus, and AP computer science his freshman year. He took AP/BC calculus his sophomore year, multi-variate calculus his junior year, and linear algebra online through Indiana College his senior year. Kudos to Mr Pruch, who did a create job teaching the students calculus and preparing them for the AP exam.

It was not always smooth sailing, I remember a constant battle to try and get him to do his EPGY work for the day before playing video games. The video games were becoming an unhealthy addiction in my opinion. I tried various things to try and slow down his video game time, but did not have much success.

It was around this time that my eyes were opened to the advantages of online learning for motivated students. I took several online classes myself through Udacity and Coursera. One course in particular, Design of Computer Programs by Peter Norvig, made a lasting impression on me. I loved that course. It was everything that I thought a computer science class should be.

From 2011 - 2015 or so I attended the equity council meetings at the school district. There were many interesting discussions about what could be done to narrow the achievement gap. I created a web forum for the group that no one seemed to use but me. I got into quite a bit of hot water when I suggested that maybe a significant part of the achievement gap was due to different cultures having different values when it came to education.

For Brian's 7th and 8th grade years at Alvarado Middle school, I was able to start the after-school math and computer programs again. The principal, Hui Stevens, was very supportive and was able to match me with an ambitious new teach named Nicholas Comendant. Mr Comendant was a coder himself and was very supportive of my after-school programs which was hosted in his room. I enjoyed hearing about the educational software that he was creating. For seventh grade, I did a math league style program, and for 8th-grade the students worked on Scratch projects.

When Brian started high school, I started an after-school computer science club. It was difficult to find a teacher who would let me use their classroom after school, but I eventually found a teacher, Mr Haight, who allowed me to share his classroom with the existing robotics club. By this time, I think Brian was kind of tired of hearing what I had to say, and he did not come very much. Instead, he went to Mr Prucha's math club, or other clubs. That was fine. There were many other students interested in CS who did come, and I was happy to work with them. In fact, I continued to be an adviser for the club for several years after Brian graduated and went on to study CS at UC Berkeley. I had to pay $70 to get the proper clearance from the DOJ and get a volunteer badge so that I could be in the classroom when no certified teacher was present. Most years I took teams of students to go compete at CodeQuest in Sunnyvale.

Brian graduated from High School in 2017. His academic record was excellent, and he did well on quite a few AP exams. He was also a star on the Logan swim team. For a while there, we were very concerned about him getting into college. He had not bothered to get teacher recommendations and had not fulfilled the UC foreign language requirement (2 years of a language). Because of scheduling problems, he did not take a language at the school, but rather tried to learn Japanese on his own and with a tutor online. It did not go very well, and he was not able to pass the standardized tests at a level high enough to meet the UC requirement. At the last minute, he took a semester of Spanish at Chabot in an attempt to fulfill the requirement. That one semester was supposed to count for 2 years of high school Spanish, however, it was unreported and not recognized at the time he made his college applications. Somehow he still got accepted to Berkeley and is now taking 2 semesters of Japanese as a graduation requirement for language while majoring in computer science. I guess we should not have worried - but that is what a parent does.

At Brian's suggestion, I've started listening to Ben Shapiro. I like his common-sense libertarian viewpoint. His is the only podcast that I listen to regularly.

Brian started at Berkeley in 2018 after hanging out at home for about 6 months and trying to take some classes at Chabot. I think he had a great Berkeley experience for the first year or two, but then the pandemic hit, and he had to participate from home. He graduated early, in Dec 2020. Since he was able to graduate in only 3 years, and lived at home part of that time, he saved us a boatload on expenses. I hope someday to use that leftover 529 money to go back to grad school and get my PhD (if he doesn't do it first).

After graduating, he spent about 6 months at home working on gaming projects and interviewing with companies. He accepted a position with Amazon Web Services as a site reliability engineer in Dallas in July of 2021. He worked there for about 3 months before quitting and joining an NFT/gaming startup called Augminted Labs that was more to his liking. He moved to Milwaukee for a while, where the company had leased office space, but then started moving around. He came home for a while, then moved to Culver City in LA, then to London, then back to LA. His favorite hobby during this time is rock climing. One of the silver linings of the COVID pandemic is that it has allowed so many the freedom to work from anywhere.

Having the flexibility to work from anywhere came in handy when in the summer of 2022 my sister and I needed to help our parents transition to assisted living and sell their house. I was in NJ for nearly 4 months processing and cleaning everything from the house, getting it ready for sale. As my friend Rich said, it was a monumental task. I made it back in September just in time for in-person company kick-off meetings in San Jose and San Francisco.

• Near Death Experiences
• My Psychological Profile
• My Martial Arts Background
• Career Day Speech (that never happened)