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 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. 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.