Adulthood

Aikido and Knees

After aikido class one night, Michael Speece had asked me how to do spinning kicks. I tried to explain by jumping in the air, rotating 360 degrees, and landing on 2 feet, without the kick. If I had done the kick, it would have been fine, but without the kick, there was nothing to stop the rotational inertia of my body except my foot when it hit the ground. That force went into my knee. The muscles in my knee were likely already fatigued from an evening of aikido practice. There was a loud crack as my ACL gave way. I limped home with help. At the time, we lived in an apartment close to the dojo.

I had my Aikido shodan test in April 1994 at Jack Wada's San Jose dojo.

I love practicing Aikido, but tearing my ACL when I was 27 slowed me down. I had 2 ACL reconstructions and each one had a 5 - 6 month recovery period. I also had a bucket handle tear in my meniscus, and at least one other surgery between 1997 and 2008. My sister-in-law, Truc, and brother-in-law, Calvin, also tore their ACL's right around the same time I did. Truc tore hers playing badminton, and Calvin tore his playing soccer.

I went to the orthopedist a day or two later and he gave me the options. In hindsight I probably should have just skipped the reconstructive surgery. It didn't work out that well. The doctor removed one third of my patellar tendon and used that to replace the broken ACL. It took six months to recover. I had a lot of support during that time. I probably was too aggressive in the things I did to try and recover. At one point I remember riding my bike up the face of Mission Peak. Riding down I had more than one fall over the front of my handlebars. Fortunately, I was able to do aikido rolls to save myself from a broken neck, but I was wearing a knee brace and it's possible it did more damage. I was able to return to aikido after 6 months, but when I went to see the orthopedist, he told me that it was still like I did not have an ACL. I could definitely feel some instability in my knee when doing some activities. A few years later, I decided to do the surgery again with a different Dr. This time, they decided to use a cadaver tendon - the tendon from a dead guy - likely killed on a motorcycle. The surgery seemed to go better, but a few years later, another orthopedist told me that it was like the ACL was not there. After that, I decided to just live with it.

At one point the lack of ACL caused me to get a bucket handle tear in the meniscus of that knee. This is a very painful condition where, when you bend your knee, the meniscus buckles inward into the knee causing pain. As I slowly unbent my knee, the meniscus would suddenly unbuckle, causing more pain. The surgeon trimmed out the buckle, but then I was missing much of the meniscus that is used to pad and protect the knee. Later I had another surgery to remove painful scar tissue. Then decades later, I had a bike accident, tearing the meniscus in my other knee. Through all this, I continued to practice aikido and do other activities, but I need to be careful — and I am still not careful enough.

Marriage and Family

Aside from the knee surgeries, the 90's were a great time. I did a lot of activities with family. There were lots of weddings and new nieces and nephews. We visited Yosemite, Tahoe, and many other fun places around California.

I worked as a software engineer during weekdays and worked on my "fun" computer projects in the morning on the weekends.

I proposed on December 17th 1993. We were engaged for 4 years. I would have gotten married sooner, but there was a delay for reasons that were not that clear to me at the time. I later learned it was because she thought she was too young to make such an important decision. I felt very close to her whole family. They had adopted me as one of their own. We did everything together and felt similarly about most things.

On November 22, 1997, I got married. We had a simple wedding with just her mother, one sister (Truc), a niece (Vivian), and my best man (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. Some were disappointed that they missed the opportunity to attend, but we wanted to keep it small. Less drama and expense that way.

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. The pregnancy was smooth, but the birth was difficult. Brian was a bit uncooperative coming out and needed to be delivered by cesarean at 5:14 AM on April 20, 1999.

We were busy at work at the time. I did not take time off when Brian was born as I should have. It just never occurred to me as an option. I really should have done it, and it is still held against me to this day. These days, guys typically get 12 weeks of paternity leave when their wife has a kid. This seems like a lot. Either my employer did not offer that, or I did not think to ask about it. I was working on MineSet at SGI at the time. We lived in a condo at 505 Cypress Point Drive in Mountain View, so SGI was just a short bike ride away. Aside from my years working at home, it was my best commute ever. Even though I did not take off, I did spend a lot of time with Brian when I was not at work.

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.

Homes

On Dec 10, 2001, we paid off the mortgage on our two bedroom 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.

Those 8 years in the Mountain View condo were really great. It was only 1100 square feet, but it was everything we needed. On the second floor with trees outside, it was like living in a tree fort. It was close to downtown and close to work. The Pho Xe Lua restaurant was just downstairs from us. That was a favorite place to go during the pregnancy. The HOA fees were high - close to $500 by the time we left, but they covered a lot. There were 2 pools, hot tub, lakes with koi, tennis courts, and a nice clubhouse.

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

In March, 2004, we left Mountain View and moved to our new home in Union City. We wanted "more air to breathe" — which I guess meant getting a house with a back yard. Now we were back in debt, but with a larger house. It has 2400 square feet. 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.

If I had been smart and willing to take the risk, we should have kept the condo and rented it out as passive income. I didn't like having such a huge mortgage though, so we sold the condo and used the funds to pay down some of our mortgage on the new place.

We did several no-cost refinancings of our mortgage from 2008 to 2013 as rates fell after the financial crisis.

Money, Politics, and Government

In September 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 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, the executive branch should have less power, and the Federal government should be more limited.

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

In 2019, John R convinced me to buy a little bitcoin. I went down the rabbit hole — studying it, running thought experiments, arguing about monetary history. I believe a bitcoin-standard future would be good for humanity. See Thoughts on Bitcoin for the arguments, related models, and links to the Claude debates where I worked them out.

I am a strong proponent of more red-light cameras at intersections as a deterrent to reckless driving. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to convince Union City to adopt them. I've had many close calls at intersections when walking or riding my bike. I routinely see drivers run lights and do all sorts of crazy things. I believe the answer is automation, not hiring more police officers. Sometimes privacy concerns are raised as an argument against cameras at intersections. I don't think that is justified as intersections are public areas.

Side Projects and Hobbies

In 2005 I read The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. His argument clicked. I agreed that we would likely reach some sort of technological singularity somewhere between 2040 and 2050. The exact date is very hard to predict, but it seemed inevitable given the exponential trends. People are terrible at predicting things with exponential growth. One of my favorite questions for telling whether someone understands exponentials: amoebas float on a lake and divide in two every hour; if they cover the whole lake in 48 hours, when do they cover half? Most people say 24 hours because they think linearly. The answer is 47.

In October 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 Skerritt. That put 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. See also the props notes.

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 I 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.

There were a few years around this time when I stopped going to aikido. I needed to give my knees a break. I was reluctant to give it up since it was such a big part of my life for so long. I did start practicing aikido again more regularly starting in 2017 - at Hayward Aikido, and then with Isaiah Fernandez at Union City Aikido at Dragon's Den close to my home starting in 2019. Sunny Skys closed his dojo on Osgood road in Fremont around 2017. I had practiced there for nearly 23 years. The dojo members reformed the dojo as a non-profit at a new location, but I had moved on.

From 2006 on, I built my own computers rather than buying them pre-built. I don't think I save much 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 2026, after 17 years. We bought a Garmin GPS. This was before we had smartphones. Now that we have smartphones, there are a whole lot of other devices like that which we no longer need to buy.

Around 2010, I read the Hikaru 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 goodbye 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 contacts regularly. I missed only one day of work after the surgery. It was 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 much more enjoyable now.

In 2012, John R, 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 more regularly with his friend Kevin.

At Brian's request, we adopted our cat Percy in July, 2011. What a wonderful cat he was. 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. Percy died suddenly in 2021. He had had some sort of gastro-intestinal illness, but we thought that he had recovered.

Later in 2021, Brian brought home a new kitten, Chip. Chip was found on a wood chip pile apparently abandoned by its mother. It was a newborn and Brian nursed it like its mother for the first few weeks. Chip is an annoying, trouble-maker of a cat, but we still love him.

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 willing 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, TypeScript. 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. Kotlin also looks good, but I never bothered to learn it because I had invested more time in Scala. I like Scala 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.

Java and Scala are nice languages, but they are not easy to deploy. Initially, they could be deployed as Applets, then as Webstart. Both of those mechanisms were later deprecated and then disabled in the browser due to security concerns. For a while I deployed using a zip file with executables inside, but that was clunky. Since 2026, I deploy using prebuilt installers. The jpackage feature in newer Java versions allowed for making installers. This is still clunky though. As a result, most of my projects are now implemented in Svelte and Typescript. It makes them much easier to deploy. I can also use Cloudflare for a backend if needed.

Since the advent of AI and coding agents in 2025, I barely need to know how to code anymore. Everything has gotten much easier.

Some games that I implemented in Scala were: Galactic Empire (send ships out to resource producing planets, while defending from other players and the computer), MasterMind, Checkers, Go-moku/Pente, Conway's game of life, and 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 love going back and reviewing and improving the projects over the years as the tools and technology improves. 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.

Travel

In 2011, we took a family trip to Vietnam for 3 weeks. Part of the time we stayed with one of my brothers-in-law 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 and high inflation. Everyone seems to have their own little business of selling peanuts or lottery tickets. If you make a business that is too successful, the government will come and take it away from you. 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 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 underwater.

In July 2017, the 3 of us traveled to Peru and hiked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu with John R. Afterward, 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 grandkids 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.

Schools, Go, and COVID

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 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.

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 joined the group on meetup.com, but then never came. 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 (2 dan) joined and brought some of his other high school friends. We still have a thriving club in 2026.

In 2024, Steve Bloom, the organizer for the Oakland Go club was struck by a hit and run driver at an intersection as he rode his bicycle home from the Starbucks on Broadway where the club was held on Sundays. He suffered in the hospital for a week before dying. No one in the club even knew that he was there. The following week one of his neighbors from the apartment where he lived came to the club to let us know what had happened. I attended a memorial at the intersection where he was hit.

When COVID hit in early 2020, my Go club needed to move online. We were finally able to resume our meetings at the library sometime in 2021

COVID hit the Aikido community hard. Many dojos closed and many instructors died around this time. I don't know if it was directly related to COVID, but Senseis Ivin Faust (my first teacher), Donovan Waite, and JD Sandoval all passed around this time.

Helping My Parents

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. I worked remotely from the house for those 4 months. 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.

Toward the end of my stay, I had company from home. In the evenings, we went through hundreds of my mother's old slides in order to sort them and discard the uninteresting ones. There were a lot of uninteresting slides as my mother didn't seem to take many pictures of people. Mostly she took pictures of flowers, churches, and graveyards.

The realtor convinced us to paint the interior, resurface the floors, and finish the cellar. It was all a waste as the new owners gutted the whole thing and started over. They expanded the garage, making it a 3 car garage instead of 2. They expanded the back of the house and tore down the wall between kitchen and living room to make a giant kitchen. The new owners also plowed under all the landscaping that my father had worked so hard on for 50 years. What remained was just barren grass. Pam didn't want mom to see the new property after renovation because she thought it would make her sad.

My parents moved to assisted living at Brandywine. Dad didn't like it, so we had to move them to Fellowship Village. Fellowship Village was a bit better, but I got the feeling that my father was not going to be happy anywhere. He liked to complain a lot. I remember him complaining one time that they got their appetizer after their main course, and that he got served fish when he had ordered steak.

I always reminded my father that on every dimension, his life was objectively better than 99.9% of all humans that had ever lived. In terms of family, home, employment, health, longevity, and everything else he had it great. Unfortunately, he always seemed upset and unhappy about nearly everything. Cats, classical music, and fishing outdoors were the things that gave him the most pleasure.

One of the best afternoons I spent with him came a bit earlier, in November 2019, long before any of this. I got curious about where the Beckers came from and started digging around on ancestry.com. He knew his relatives history well — names, dates, relations, all off the top of his head — including the fact that his own grandmother, Sarah Alice Becker, born February 8, 1898 in High Bridge, NJ, was raised mostly by her aunt Nellie Graham, because her real mother, Annie Cecilia Gordon, died in childbirth. I'm glad that we had that discussion.

Even though the two big lessons that I learned from my father were "life keeps getting worse" and "people suck", he was a good father. He made big sacrifices for his family. At the dinner table, he gave my sister and me the best cuts of meat. My mother got the next best, and he always took the worst. After work at the office, he would often come home and work in the garden some before dinner. He worked hard. For fun he often went fishing with his friend, Russ Parcel, on the weekend. My father and mother were both very frugal, saving all that they could so that they would be able to pay for wherever my sister and I chose to go to college.

Dad passed away at Fellowship Village on October 24, 2023. Pam and I spent much of the following year untangling his estate — old stock shares that had sat in his name since the days when people still held individual paper stock certificates, qualified disclaimers, medallion guarantees, an estate attorney in New Jersey walking us through it all while we coordinated from opposite sides of the country. It was exactly as tedious as it sounds, but we got through it as a team.

Mom stayed on at Fellowship Village a while longer, and Pam and I settled into a rhythm of managing her affairs together. By 2025 she needed more care than assisted living could give her, and she moved into memory care, where she still is.