Graduate School

I wanted to create computer graphics like I saw in the movies. It was amazing how computer generated images could bring any idea to life. Nelson Max was one of the foremost researchers in the field of computer graphics.

In June 1990 I left the east coast and went to California. I started life as a student-employee at UC Davis at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). My adviser was Nelson Max.

The summers were fun because 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 was 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.

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 arts 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. Sometimes people got hit very hard. It was a foolish, risky thing to do in hindsight. Fortunately, I survived these experiences.

While living in Livermore, and working at LLNL, I lived at a number of different locations. At first I rented a room in a house with an older divorced woman. There was also another tenant there. He was an intern at the lab. I got along fine with the other tenant, but the owner was always asking us to help her do odd jobs or watch TV with her. When I left, she kept the security deposit, even though I had cleaned everything out.

I bought a used, red Nissan 200sx sports car (with stick shift) for $5000. It was a newer version of the Datsun 200sx that I had bought from Rich for $1 the last year of RPI. I really liked the car. I took it on many trips to Yosemite, camping, etc. It would last many years. I later gave it away when someone in the family needed a car. Ultimately, it died because we forgot to change the timing belt before it needed it.

Next, I lived at a house even closer to the lab, with 2 other physics grad students. There was a heavy bag mounted in the garage. That was nice, and I used it a lot. It was around this time that I met my first girlfriend, Barbara. She was employed as a nanny for one of the UC Davis professors. I met her at one of the grad student mixers. At first I thought she was one of the grad students. We spoke for a bit there, and later she called me. We drove to different places in my Nissan and had a great time that summer, but then she went home to Wyoming.

Somewhere around my second year at LLNL, I decided to go to the main UC Davis campus. Ostensibly, it was to take some classes that were not offered at the lab, but really it was so that I could meet more women. There were way more eligible women at the campus than at the UC extension in Livermore. I sublet a room in an apartment with 2 other students. It was wonderful being on campus. There were so many bicycles. I had a nice bike, and rode to classes along with every one else. There were rivers of bicycles. My nice bicycle was stolen on like the second day. Then I got a crappy bike, and it lasted much longer. I practiced aikido and took gymnastics. I learned to do a forward handspring - which is quite an accomplishment for someone who is 6 feet tall. I very nearly broke my neck trying to do a backward handspring, however. There were many attractive women at gymnastics. I went on dates with two of them. I don't think I did the date thing very well because both were just single dates. My follow up was not very good. I also went on a date with another woman I met at a party there, but that also wasn't going to work out because it turned out that she was married.

School generally went well, but at one point I registered for a Dynamic Programming class in college and then simply forgot to attend, earning myself an administrative F. I think that it showed as an icomplete rather than impact my GPA. Regardless, I needed to pay more attention.

I met Jeff Greenberg at aikido. He had a shodan from Chiba sensei in San Diego. He told me lots of fun stories about how brutal Chiba was to some of his students. Not sure if the stories were true, but they were entertaining.

When I returned from UC Davis, I rented a room in a house on the west side of Livermore from Seth Abrams. Seth was an employee at the Lab. I started traveling to Fremont evenings to practice aikido there. Sunny and his wife, Miki, were just starting a large Aikido dojo there.

It was at the Fremont dojo that I met my wife and her family in Oct 1992. She is one of 8 sisters and 4 brothers - many of whom practiced at the aikido school there in Fremont. For our first date, I took her and a bunch of her nieces and nephews (Sterling, Crystal, Chrissie, and Jennifer) to see the movie "Aladdin" in Milpitas. It was a great first date. We both felt "electricity" when our hands touched reaching for the popcorn. We went to Fresh Choice afterward. It was an interesting dinner conversation since she barely spoke English at the time. She had just come to California from Vietnam less than a year ago. The kids helped smooth over any awkwardness. 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. At the time most of her family lived in Fremont, but over the years many have moved to other states.

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 presented the results of my master's thesis Smooth Transitions Between Bump Rendering Algorithms at SIGGRAPH 93.