Projects

• I've been attempting National Novel Writing Month every year since 2002. The goal is to write 50000 words of fiction during the calendar month of November. I failed in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2008, and won in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009. Every year I work on the same "novel," writing additional chapters which I will later concatenate, although this is technically forbidden by the Nanowrimo rules. So if you're a stickler, I've never won and you can go to hell.
  • Flowers Become Screams -- full "novel" to date. This contains an accretion of the yearly installments below, plus some minimal editing. Some of the particularly bad parts have been deleted.
• I tried and failed Script Frenzy in 2007 -- it's the screenplay equivalent of Nanowrimo: write a 20000-word screenplay during the calendar month of June. I got about halfway through, but I lost momentum when my cat died on the 7th, and I never got all the way back in the game. It didn't help that the story sucked.
• Collecting my brother's thoughts on Columbo, 1970s tv detective.
• Yammer.net, a web-based gale client.
• "Photography." Some of it in product form.
• I went to a Spanish immersion school in Mexico twice, which experience I would recommend to others. Slang.
• Ongoing mysterious notes to myself.
• Feeding myself, September, 2000, and the project's conclusion.
• Mesh subdivision demo programs, a summer research project in 1998.
• Fair surface design, a mesh editing tool that incorporates mesh subdivision and linear time Taubin smoothing to allow real-time smooth deformations, for CS 174c, 1997.
• Graphical editor for parallel programs written in mcc, for CS 139c, 1997.
• An arcade game I wrote for CS174a, 1996.
• Wavelet based texture synthesis, project for Peter Schröder, 1995-96.

Uh

• IRS forms
• INS forms
• CA tax forms
• pay parking tickets online

Pictures

It has been suggested that every home page should have a blurb describing the author's life so that when people run into each other they won't have to cover the boring basics every single time because they've checked the home page. So pay attention.

Quick Life Statement

Since the last installment, I:

1. Left Oracle
2. Started at a startup called PageBites
3. Didn't get accepted to any creative writing grad programs
4. Moved to a house in the Haight (and my brother moved back to Egypt)
5. Quit/volunteered to be laid off from the startup
6. Spent two months living off my severance checks and doing nothing constructive
7. Got hired by Google
8. Got paid by the landlord to move out of the house in the Haight on account of something called the Ellis Act
9. Got an apartment alone in the Mission
10. Started working at Google

So now I work at Google and they feed me free lunch and dinner and provide a bus that drives me from the city to the Silicon Valley hinterlands and back again. My goal is to some day have enough money that I can relive that two months of doing nothing constructive forever. Everybody says they'd go crazy without a job, but I think they're just scared of how awesome that crazy would be.

• August 2002
• October 2002
• March 2005

Twice as clear as heaven. Twice as loud as reason.

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