I love to learn! It’s one of life’s most rewarding experiences. What follows is a brief educational biography.

The beginning

When I was a child, my mom taught me to read. I am greatly thankful for this. She frequently took me to the library to check out books. According the the librarian’s records, I read 200 books the summer before my first year of school. I was reading books on a fourth grade level.

I entered school a year late. My mother tried to convince the school to start me in the first grade instead of kindergarten. They refused. So I went to class for a week or two. The class was learning about the letters using the Letter People filmstrips. Another part of the class structure included story time. I asked my teacher if I could read to the class. She permitted me, so I brought a book from my phonics set. The book was not intended to be read by the child, but by the parent. Its purpose was to expose the child to some specific phonemes. So I read the story to the class and my teacher was amazed. She immediately informed the principal that I didn’t belong in her class. I was promoted to the first grade.

A little later

I came to fall in love with science and engineering. It was very fascinating to me how things worked. Once I was tasked with cleaning the living room. When it came time to vacuum the carpet, the vacuum cleaner did not work. I decided to figure out why. I found that it was easy to remove the bottom plate and discovered that there was a brush which was driven by a belt attached to a shaft. I didn’t know there was a brush; I thought it simply sucked stuff up. I found the drive system very clever and it was obvious that the vacuum cleaner wasn’t working because the belt was broken. I didn’t have anything suitable to fix it. Learning about the belt drive system was very rewarding and I wondered what other treasures lie inside, so I continued to probe. The mechanism which held the vacuum cleaner in the upright position for storage was also very interesting. I was delighted. My mother came in the room and the vacuum was in pieces spread across the entire floor. “I’m fixing it!” I said. She wasn’t too happy because a new vacuum cleaner was not in the budget. I think she went to her room to cool off. I quickly put the whole thing together and brought it to her. I showed her why it wasn’t working. I’m sure she was very relieved.

Another delighful experience I remember is that I received a chemistry set as a gift. My dad helped me with the experiments. The most fun was getting to heat test tubes over the alcohol lamp. Some things would change from gray or brown dust to brilliant beautiful colors. Other things would sputter violently. This is one of the fondest memories of my father. Another great experience was that my father brought home a Compaq Portable which he received from a friend.

To my knowlege this was our family’s first computer. It was an all-in one kind of system: a keyboard, monitor and computer all attached. It ran DOS, was nearly thirty pounds, and had two 320Kb floppy drives and no hard disk. I believe this one eventually bit the dust when a capacitor on the motherboard popped (it was exciting!). Our next computer was an IBM PC XT. This one had a 10 Mb hard drive the size of a child’s shoe box! I still have a board from that computer which has some very impressive looking chokes. It was on this computer which I started programming in GW Basic. I also learned how to connect to bulletin board systems (BBSs). There were local magazines which had listings of BBSs in the back; some charged money, others were free. In those days, you didn’t so much go to a website address (http://…etc), you dialed a number. Most BBSs were run by hobbyists. Each BBS had its own users and content. Sometimes they would link to other bulletin boards. Some boards also had the ability to let you chat with the host. This was very exciting! It was the first time I had contacted another human through the computer. The modem we used to connect to these boards was slow enough that you saw the letters come in character by character. Some bad sci-fi graphics still show this type of behavior: screens displaying character-by-character information. Eventually, we bought a computer with a 386 25MHz(I think) processor. This was the first computer we had which could display non character-based graphics. It was capable of running Windows 3.11

After my first year of high school, the school district redrew the district boundaries, which would place me at a different school. The school I was in, however, was superior to where I would be going, so I wanted to stay at my current school. I let my father know and he found a way to get the people in charge of such things to let me stay. Part of the expense of staying at the school was that the busses no longer had a drop near my home, so I had to have my own transportation.

I am greatful to my father who would drop me off and pick me up every day. since my father had a normal job, but school let out in the middle of the afternoon, I always had a couple of hours to kill. I loved going to the library for this. Rather than doing my homework (which I hated doing and still hate to do), I read books about all kinds of subjects. There was a huge book about how stuff works; for instance, it described how a can of shaving cream works. There were another couple of books which posed interesting questions such as “Why is tennis scoring so weird?” and “Why does a parachute have a hole at the top?” then proceded to answer them. Other books I enjoyed included subjects such as cryptography, black holes, and particle physics. This time in the library after school was very enjoyable.

College

In my senior year of high school I didn’t do too well. I received a couple of bad grades (including a D and an F in my English course over a couple of the quarters). I was getting burned out with all the busy work that was necessary. In spite of the bad last year, I still finished with >3.5 GPA and was accepted to the University of South Florida. I was looking forward to a new experience and challenging courses. I was especially excited about learning more math and physics. I attempted a couple of semesters but was thoroughly disappointed with the experience; it was exactly like high school. The most disappointing thing was that I had to take first year calculus which was exactly what I had already learned in high school. I eventually simply stopped going to classes (and didn’t go through the withdraw process (a bad bad decision). I went to work several years in the restaraunt industry. I quickly stood out and worked every position, I became a trainer, a store opener, and a key (sort of like a jr. manager) and finally made the jump to management. Even though I did well, I hated the work and decided to go back to school.

Currently

I am finally finishing college; just a few credits until I earn my BS in electrical engineering. I have very much enjoyed it (with the exception of a few courses, of course!) and I will be very happy to leave school and begin real work. In addition to my formal education, I continue learning on my own. I enjoy learning from books such as Spivak’s Calculus and Fulton’s The Ruby Way. Another amazing learning resource which I have yet to take full advantage of is an enormous library of engineering classes on video provided for free by the Indian Intitutes of Technology. The videos are great and they have pretty much an entire electrical engineering curriculum.

Hello, and thank you for your interest in my blog. It is my intention to place here some essays and general thoughts on topics I’m interested in. Which include all of the following:

• Technology
• Programming
• Engineering
• MEMS
• VLSI
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Photography
• Music
• Nature
• Graphic Design