About me:
I am an undergraduate at Stanford jointly from El Cerrito, CA and Madison, WI.
Most of my work is in computer graphics.
I was born in East Lansing, Michigan. I can't remember the 2 years I lived there, nor can I remember moving to Davis, California. I attended 3 of these schools, many of which had different names back in the early 90's, until 4th grade, at which point I briefly moved to Austin, Texas and had a generally OK time. Then I got dragged back to Albany, California. I went to 3 more elementary schools, then attended Albany Middle School and Albany High School.
I mostly code in my (productive) free time, and since college, all the time.
There's a list of coding projects I've done and some code here. For anyone who cares, I use vi, ([g]vim mostly), mostly because emacs isn't installed on my ubuntu [virtual] machines.
I started programming using Game Maker in 2002 when it was not a commercial product. Of course, since no one I knew really knew a whole lot about this stuff, I didn't actually learn that much. I think that given more guidance I could have done a lot of my college-level work in high school, which is why I think secondary education computer science teaching (at public schools, anyway) needs to be dramatically improved. Of course, most programmers make twice as much in industry, and the ones who can actually teach probably make 4 times more...
I decided to specialize in graphics because I enjoy the fact that I can be doing something vaguely artistic using math. The only other area I'm ok at is computer systems, but I decided against that after taking a systems course with my least favorite professor ever.
Other than coding, I also pretend to be a connoisseur of popular music/design, watch movies about suburban angst, study computational mathematical jibberjabber, and occassionally play videogames.
Academically, Stanford is OK. There are good professors and really bad ones, just like any other place, so the amount you learn is pretty much dependent on you. I've found that (at least in CS) higher level courses tend to be better taught and much more interesting than the lower-level courses, and that's slowly improved my opinion on academics here as time has gone by.
However, on the non-academic side, things aren't quite as nice. I'm not as rah-rah as all the other undergrads here about this place, mostly due to fact that my freshman dorm experience was terrible. It was probably my fault for expecting better, but it was pretty much living with a bunch of overly egotistical high school students.
Besides a handful of excellent professors and my closest friends, I don't really think Stanford is special in any way.
The fact everyone else pretends it's perfect here really bugs me, though. Stanford has some serious problems that I can't see being fixed anytime soon. It really isn't worth it to ruin your life trying to get in, like I've seen quite a few people do. I probably would be just as happy or happier at a decent public university. You can quote me on that.
I coded this site (html, css, javascript) & and wrote all the content, except where noted. I'm not sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a good repository for any further work I do for future reference. Oh, and all the code here is copylefted or whatever, you can use it for anything without attributing it to me, even for commercial purposes. In fact, please don't attribute anything here to me. I don't really want people to associate quick hacked together code with my name.
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