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About Me |
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Growing up in Southern California I grew up in San Diego County in the cities of Carlsbad/Encinitas, went to Flora Vista Elementary School, Oak Crest Jr. High, San Dieguito High School, and attended UC San Diego in La Jolla for my bachelors (Engineering Physics), masters (Materials Science) and doctoral (Materials Science, advisors Paul K.L. Yu, and S.S. Lau at UC San Diego, Dept of ECE) degrees. For most of my life, I've lived less than 4 miles from the Pacific Ocean, until I moved cross-country to Durham, NC. I thought it was funny that people would market Durham as being only a 4 hour drive away from the ocean. Anyways, there are lots of nice things about SoCal. The weather being foremost; restaurants - In N Out burger, good mexican food just about everywhere, Chinatown, little India, little Saigon, little Italy all at most a 2 hour drive or less (coming from San Diego or Los Angeles, accounting for traffic). Traffic would be a mild problem in San Diego and is steadily getting worse. Housing is also a problem as houses are extremely expensive. My younger brother currently lives in San Diego near the Mormon temple (for those of you who may be familiar with the area) and works at the space and naval warfare systems center in Point Loma, California. |
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Hobbies and outside activities
I took classical piano lessons for 8 years in my youth and still occasionally play, however, I don't practice all that much now. When I do play, I enjoy playing rags by Scott Joplin, Chopin’s pieces, Liszt, among others. When the video is digitized, there will be a show of Roummel Marcia and me playing Chopin’s fantasie-impromptu in C# minor sequentially, on the same piano, while trying to finish off a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts; taking place at Coffeehouse (we were only able to finish 10.5 donuts in the time to play the piece).
Volleyball I started playing organized 6 man indoor volleyball in high school, and have enjoyed it ever since. I typically play setter and/or outside hitter in a 6-2 or 5-1 formation. Any local teams teams looking for a setter?
This game really gets the adrenaline pumping! It's a bit expensive but it's really fun! I own 2 F-4 illustrator markers but haven't played since coming out to North Carolina. In San Diego, we played at Camp Pendleton and at Weekend Warriors in Alpine, California, about 30 miles east of San Diego. There is *no* comparison with “Laser Tag” - which has no realistic penalty for getting “shot”. There’s nothing like the fear of “the sting” of paint breaking on you to keep your head in the game and tradeoff risk and reward.
Pingpong– Anyone for pingpong?
Road trips San Diego to Vancouver, B.C, Canada, by way of Eugene, OR. San Diego to Silverton, CO with a stop over at Mesa Verde. Amigo, West Virginia to San Diego by way of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Cooking - like doing science but with results you can eat! (or not!)
Skiing— I was fortunate to learn to ski in the famous Rocky Mountain powder and so I was able to fall countless times without getting hurt. The downside is that the powder is so soft, you can get stuck in to if it ever gets up to your waist! Places I have skied: Mammoth mountain, CA Brighton, UT Solitude, UT Snowbird, UT
Counterstrike— a fun, and addictive game if you like first person shooters! If you play online with other people (the only way to play), every game is different, even with the same people and the same map.
Starcon II — old school game, but the storyline is excellent! DungeonKeeper — where you get to be the evil dungeon master… Duke Nukem — Come get some…
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The Sunday Dinner group
Back in 1999, I was cooking a simple dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce when I received a phone call to go out with a few other students to hit the all you can eat pasta bowl buffet at ‘Pasta Bravo’. Since I was already halfway done cooking, I invited these hungry people (Becky (Welty) Nikolic (now at Lawrence Livermore National Labs), Ryan Lu (now at SPAWAR, San Diego), Masaya Iwamoto (now at Agilent, Santa Rosa, CA), “Fun buns” (I don’t remember his real name, and don’t ask where he got that name!)) over for dinner - for free. They readily accepted and decided that having dinner at my apartment for free was a good thing! Being somewhat bored of eating by myself, I acknowledged the “good idea” and invited them over the following week. After a few weeks of this, they began to feel guilty about eating all my food, and so one of them decided that they would each bring an item over to help me cover the burden of feeding them. This worked the first time, however, the next few times were more or less a disaster, with someone forgetting to bring their item, and/or bringing the item another person was supposed to bring, etc. Finally, it was decided that one person would bring everything they needed to my place and cook things there to feed everyone we would rotate. Just as things were settling into a nice routine, other people started to show up. At first, it was just one person one week and another person the next week with no repeat visitations. One week, an old acquaintance of mine, that my brother still kept into contact with was invited and also decided that this was a good idea. He invited the group to come over to this apartment to have Carne Asada for dinner! The bar was raised! So you see the pattern...more people come, head chef rotations were made, dining locations were rotated, outside activities were organized, annual BBQ's were established, a website was created to notify people of cooking rotation ( the previous solution was that everyone would email me - every week to ask who was cooking...), one couple met and got married because of the dinner group and it is still going strong as of 2007! I have forged some of my closest friendships through this group and we have all managed to keep in touch. Some have moved away and other's have joined and left, but the core group is mostly there and keeping the fire burning! |
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After Graduate School After I received my Ph.D., I worked for the Boeing Company in El Segundo, CA (Los Angeles) at their satellite development center right next to LAX. I was in the technology qualification group and worked on reliability and failure analysis of SiGe and III-V compound semiconductor HBTs and HEMTs. It was while I was working and living in LA that I met my future wife to be through a mutual friend. She was attending a 3 month workshop (IPAM)at UCLA and being new to the area, the mutual friend (Roummel Marcia) of ours asked her to look me up. Before long, we discovered we just clicked and soon after we were engaged. We were married in Plainfield, IL (outside Chicago [Wedding pictures]) on December 30, 2005. She is currently an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University working on problems associated with signal and image processing. She recently applied for and received an NSF career award—which is extremely competitive. I am very proud of her. |
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Life in North Carolina—We’ve been in Durham since August of 2005
While the weather isn’t San Diego weather here in Durham, it still is pretty nice...mild winters, a real Spring and Autumn, but a wicked Summer (hot as hell with mosquitoes from about July to mid-October). We’re far enough inland so that only the most severe hurricanes seem to affect us, and there are no earthquakes and almost no tornado risk. You can get out into the “country” with a 10-15 minute drive and the land is relatively cheap—for now. People are generally pretty nice (you get a lot more waves while driving down the street than you do in LA, where you’re more likely to get the bird). As long as you stay off the interstate during rush hour, traffic is typically not heavy, though it is getting worse. I just hope our city leaders have enough sense to push to implement a public rail system connecting the three universities to the airports and other major points of interest (e.g. malls, downtown, the Triad…) before it turns into LA—and costs ten times as much.
Places we have visited outside Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill: High Point, Hickory: furniture shopping Burlington: outlets Winston-Salem : FLOW MINI dealer Asheville: The Biltmore Estate—where they measure living area in acres. Hotsprings (about 1 hr north of Asheville): white water rafting New Bern: Colonial Village
Things we like to do: · drive out of the city limits looking at potential places to live in. What I would really like is a house on a ~20 acre plot of land. That way, we can have our own circle driveway, large garden with a tractor, two story gazebo with a firepit and slides, paintball field, workshop, and fishing pond. · Furniture shopping · Touring the parade of homes · Things we would like to do in the near future: midnight canoeing while star gazing, daytime canoeing, more camping, exploring Carrboro and outlying towns and cities, and exploring the Outer Banks and Wilmington.
Currently, we have fun hanging out with our friends from work and other transplants from the west coast, Carrie and Eugene Wu, and our neighbors Karli and Mckell Carston (formerly Carter).
We recently saw Jorge Cham of the Ph.D. comic strip fame promoting ‘The power of procrastination’ on his tour, at Duke University’s Page Auditorium.
There are numerous hiking/running trails in the Duke Forest in west Durham off highway 751. You can see parking areas at the trail heads and will often see cars already parked there. Maps of this area can be found at the Duke University Bookstore, or you can ask me since I have the map.
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After wedding ceremony with maid of honor and best man. |
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At Mario Figueiredo’s house with Becca and Rui in Lisbon, Portugal in a 3 way chair. |
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At Silverton, CO gold mine tour with Chris and Teresa Mckinney, Crazy Phil and Miner Dan. |
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The Sunday Dinner group at our wedding reception in San Diego |
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Posing with 1 year old Veronica Mckinney on the way to AJ and Monica Fleming’s wedding ceremony. |
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Visiting Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering |
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State flower: Dogwood State bird: Cardinal Highest Point: Mt. Mitchell (6,684‘) State Song: The Old North State State tree: Pine State Rock: Granite State vegetable: Sweet potato State Precious Stone: Emerald State Colors: Red & Blue State Dog : Plott Hound
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At Br. Raphael’s solemn vows, St. Albert’s Priory, Oakland, CA. From L-R: Phil Larrabure, Roummel Marcia, Chris Mckinney, Teresa Mckinney, Br. Raphael, James Covalt, Felix Lu |
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Disneyland picture: Roummel Marcia, Phil Larrabure, Teresa Mckinney, Felix Lu |
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At Phil and Becky’s wedding |
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Roummel and Felix’s first attempt at making Baklava... |
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Sunday Dinner group annual outing at Mission Bay Park, San Diego. |
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Video of Becca jumping (requires Real Audio Player or equivalent) |
