Howdy! That fella to the left is me.
In a nutshell, I'm a 25-year old FOB ABC, anywhere-from-quadra-to-sexta-lingual, soccer-crazed, seasonally-video-game-addicted, too-nice-for-his-own-good programmer-cellist-music-theorist-in-training with a personal vendetta against all things unjust, dishonest, exploitive, and driving-slowly-in-left-lanes. I also love music by Brahms, and strawberries, and my best time in Expert-level Minesweeper is 99 seconds.

Ok, a little more elaboration...I was born on August 24, 1981 in Vienna, Austria and lived there until the age of 16, at which point I moved to the US. My parents are both from Taiwan; that makes me an FOB ABC - fresh off the boat Austrian born Chinese. The luckiest of circumstances led to the fact that I know anywhere between 4 and 6 languages: Chinese and German because I grew up speaking them; Russian, which my school in Vienna offered and which I studied grades 5 through 10; English, which I first was exposed to through my fascination with computers, then started at school in Vienna in grade 9 (wiss dreddfull Ostrian eksent) and finally refined after moving to the US (losing that dreadful Austrian accent); Latin, which I had for 6 years in grades 7 through 12 plus a semester in college; and finally, Taiwanese, if you count it as a separate language.

I went to Swarthmore College for my undergrad, a small liberal arts school in suburban Philly that's been consistently in the top three U.S. liberal arts colleges in the annual U.S.News ranking for the recent past (last 8 or so years). I entered the school listed as a possible Chemistry and pre-med major, switched to Engineering fairly quickly, then finally emerged in 2003 with a major in Computer science and a minor in Music. After graduation, I worked in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania for slightly more than a year. In recent years, though, the computer world has taken a backseat to my passion for music, as I'm currently in my third and last year at the Mannes College of Music in NYC, finishing off my last requirements for a Masters of Music with a double major in Cello performance and Music Theory.

I love soccer - be it playing, watching, rooting for my favorite club, SK Rapid Vienna, or playing in a video game. This past summer I had the awesome chance of watching the great Ronaldinho live, in an exhibition game between his club FC Barcelona and the local Red Bull NY squad. 69,002 people in one stadium is an experience I won't forget for a while.

Ah, video games. I used to play more than I do now, mostly due to lack of time, but every so often a game comes by that I just can't put down and play for hours and hours...like Diablo II back in College. Countless hours of power rushing characters, doing MF Meph and Pindle runs (I even found an original and completely legit Windforce, one of the most powerful weapons in the game at that time), the infamous Cow level (huge herds of pretty Cows with pretty beefed-up - pardon the pun :P - stats, walking around on two feet, mooo-ing and swinging axes at you - one careless step and you'd die). Yeah. If you played that game, you know what degree of addiction we're talking about here :). A few other all-time favorites of mine: Zelda (Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time; I recently bought a gamecube and Windwaker but have yet to play it), Final Fantasy VII, Command & Conquer (the original), Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, The Dig, Indiana Jones IV: Fate of Atlantis, Chrono Trigger, X-wing, Super Mario World.

Without rambling too much about it, I admit that I kinda do have this thing for leading my life in a honest, transparent kind of way, trying to be fair to everybody, not taking care of other people's disadvantages etc. I guess I'm an idealist with a strong sense of morals and the will to live by those rules in the hope that doing so will have inspirational effect on other people and ultimately lead to a better world. It's so deeply rooted in my character that I can't even tell a convincing lie if in playing Mafia I'm picked as the assassin. Sadly, I must report that my efforts at curing the world from all of its problems have not been fruitful so far. But there's always hope for tomorrow, no? Yeah, I suppose I'll never learn.

I'm living in NYC these days, but go back to the Philly area to teach cello at a music school there every weekend, and thus drive on the NJ and PA Turnpikes quite a lot. And doing so, I've developed quite a gripe against slow drivers in left lanes on highways. Come on! Why do slow drivers have to be driving in the left-most lane?! You're supposed to keep to the right! It'd make things so much safer if people would just keep to the right whenever they could. People wanting to drive faster would be able to, and if you want to switch lanes, you'd only have to worry about cars coming from behind on your left side, where there's no big blind spot. Oh, and I absolutely love those moments when there's a group of cars lined up across all the lanes of a highway. Driving along at the same speed. At the same SLOW speed. "Formation Flying," I heard somebody once call it. You know, people are always complaining about those crazy drivers weaving back and forth between lanes. I'm not condoning that kind of driving, but if you think about it, the fault's not entirely theirs...

And yes, I'm a huge fan of Brahms' music, and I can't get enough Strawberries. And that thing about my best expert level time in Minesweeper is true, though I only managed to break the 100 second barrier once, and immediately retired from the speed-Minsweepering world afterwards - I've lost too many hours of my life to reaching that goal.

Alright, I think that's plenty of information now. If I go on, there won't be a reason to buy my autobiography when it comes out! :)