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 "Aladdin" 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 sons-in-law. 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 has 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 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, and the Federal government should be more limited.

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 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. 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.

We did several no-cost refinancings of our mortgage during this time as rates 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 home in Union City.

From 2006 on, I build 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.

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 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. 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, 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. 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 underwater.

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 2017, the 3 of us traveled to Peru and hiked the Inca trail to Machu Pichu with John Roh. 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.

When COVID hit in 2019, my Go club needed to move online. We were finally able to resume our meetings at the library somewhere 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.