I was born December 16, 1974 in Portland, Oregon. I grew up in Milwaukie, OR (a suburb of Portland) for the first 13 years of my life. I moved to Mission Viejo, California on my 14th birthday where my family still resides.
I graduated from Capistrano Valley High School 1993. I started college Fall of 1993 at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Computer Science major. I received my BS degree in Computer Science June 1997 and am now working on my MS degree in Computer Science. I plan on finishing that up this June 1998.
I am interested in science and computers. My first interesting job was at the San Juan Institute. I was a research assistant for the planetary scientists there. I basically operated the spectrometer obtained data, made the graphs, and they did the rest. I did this part time during high school. Since I was also interested in computers I helped set up some of their computer equipment, back up stuff, and even did some of the accounting. I went back and worked for SJI during the summer of my freshman and sophomore years.
My next job was a short 2 week deal for an doctor that my Mom works for. He had me analyze his computer / network set up in the office and perform some general enhancements. He was also very interested in sailing and was in the first leg of the Whitbread race around the world. His boat had to drop out because his financial guy embezzled all the funds (he's now in jail!!) Anyway that was fun.
Near the end of my junior year at UCSB I got a summer position at a local computer company - Spectron Microsystems. I helped maintain their web page and wrote some cool Java programs that interfaced into their C API. If you would like to find out more about this let me know and I'll tell you the details. I continued working there part time during my senior year.
After I graduated with my BS degree I took another summer job in Austin, TX working for IBM. I had never really gone beyond the western states before so thought this would be a fun adventure. I liked Austin - it was a good place to live. It was a little hot during the summer and I understand gets pretty cold in the winter. They offered me a full time position after I completed my MS but I declined. After living there for a while the extreme weather conditions made it sort of uncomfortable to be outside for any long periods of time - something I like to do especially since I usually sit in front of a computer screen 8+ hours a day.
The start of my 5th year at UCSB I went back and worked part time again for Spectron. Around February they were bought out by Texas Instruments. My boss and four others decided to stay with Dialogic (the previous owners of Spectron) and start up Dialogic Santa Barbara Labs - a little research oriented "arm" of Dialogic. Anyway that is were I currently work and will most likely stay with them after I graduate.
So... there is a little about me. Have any questions, or comments? I would love to hear from you!
Last modified 21-Apr-1998
Jeff Mark