LateNightHacking Louis

Auth

I was born on April 12, 1976, in the small mountain town of Quincy in Northern California. My family moved to Grass Valley (where I picked up a sister), then to Novato, then to Sacramento where I started first grade. I went to Trajan Elementary School, then Arcade Junior High, then Casa Roble Fundamental High School. After completing my required education, I grabbed a tiger by the tail: I went to The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, better known as Caltech, and survived four years as a proud member of Ruddock House. I graduated with a BS in Computer Science in 1998.

I moved to Bellevue, Washington, and worked for a large, well known software company. I loved it, and I am proud to have been part of the team that shipped Windows 2000. Plus, I contributed to Windows XP - w32tm /? is (mostly) my fault.

A college professor of mine recruited me to work with him writing financial software. Faced with a choice between the free-agent life style and being a solid company man, I decided to take the adventurous route. I jumped ship but ended up on the wrong one. I worked in White Plains for a year before managing to join up with my professor in Minneapolis. There I was part of the team developing an automatic trading system for Deephaven Capital Management.

At the same time I joined Deephaven, a more important event occurred: Michelle and I got married June 30, 2001! Michelle was studying to be a radiologist. She graduated from Sain Louis University Medical School and did her internship at St. Johns Mercy in St. Louis. She did her radiology residency at UT Houston for four years, while I continued to commute to Minneapolis.

Deephaven lost interest in the system we built and I was let go. I was rehired by Walleye Trading, another small financial company run by the people who had originally wanted the automatic trading system at Deephaven.

Michelle did her neuroradiology fellowship at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, part of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. (Correct, back to Saint Louis!) After completing her fellowship, she has gone on to become a member of the faculty there.

By mid 2008, my wife and I decided it was time for me to stop commuting from Saint Louis to Minnesota, and I left Walleye on good terms. Looking at my opportunities around Saint Louis, I decided the persue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Washington University. After two years, I realized the program did not match my goals (I wanted to write just enough papers to be able to write lots of programs, they wanted to write just enough programs to write lots of papers) so I got my Masters and got out.

In the mean time, another important event occured! Our first child, our lovely daughter Katie Beth, was born at the end of 2009.

After leaving WashU, I decided to try working for myself writing iPhone apps. Apparently I need a co-conspirator to stay motivated, and I spent more time doing house repair projects than iPhone projects. So, after six months and 1.5 iPhone apps I declared the experiment completed and asked Walley if they would like me back on a telecommuting basis. They said, absolutely!

Can you believe it? They still pay me to do what I love to do!

-- 2012-12-30

I've used C, C++, MODULA3, 65C02 Assembly, x86 Assembly, Fuzzball MPI, Distributed MPI, Lingo, Lisp, CGI, HTML, DHTML, VRML, XML, DTD, Pascal-S, Java, JavaScript, VBScript, Ruby, Lua, Objective C, nesC, PHP, Perl, Bash, SQL, OpenGL, OpenInventor, Applesoft Basic :), plus a few more I don't remember off hand. Maybe I'll learn Intercal next.

"Yeah, well it's all fine and dandy to claim you can write a program. Let's see some proof! Put your code where your mouth is, LOGO boy!"

Hey, check out the projects section. The good stuff will be there, sooner or later.