About Me

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I grew up in the rainy city of Seattle, where the winters were mostly spent indoors. Driven by boredom and curiosity, I was drawn towards exploring the inner workings of things in search of that eureka moment of discovery. One of my earliest memories is when a family friend gave me a set of tools, and I managed to remove the doorknobs in the house. I still get nervous replacing doorknobs today. My interest in electronics began at ten when my father purchased a pair of two-way radios. "Can you hear me? How about now?" This was well before the Verizon Wireless commercials. How did a small handheld device work over such distances? I was fortunate that my father was an avid reader, mostly of fiction, as he regularly took me to the Columbia Branch library and Shorey's Bookstore. These, along with other recollections from my childhood, are fond memories of simpler times. 

Image taken with Lumix GF3 - Maunakea casting its own shadow during sunset, note the outlines of vehicles and UH-88 dome cast onto the nearby cinder cone

I was raised in a working-class family who encouraged my sister and I to find work from an early age. After picking strawberries for two summers I ended up finding a part-time job working at Holly Park Greenhouse.  Thereafter, I got a cushy job serving ice cream at Baskin Robbins on MLK Jr Way South.  After high school, I worked as a teller for Seafirst Bank over the summer before I was off to the University of Washington. And while at the UW I worked as a copy machine operator in the evenings for Rainier Bank in the basement of the Rainier Tower building.  I majored in electrical engineering and had a job lined up with Boeing Aerospace in Kent Space Center, courtesy of on-campus interviews. I had no idea what I was getting into and was assigned the task of designing an RF PCB to down-convert and digitize a radio signal from a Navy JTIDS terminal. This was also my first exposure to surface mount components and microstrip/stripline designs but fortunately, I had a good mentor (GWF). The engineering process of going from paper design to in-house circuit board fab and assembly, integration into chassis and racks, and then delivering to a Naval facility in San Diego (NOSC) was intense and at the same time appealing to me. It was fascinating stuff even thinking back today.  

After 4 years at Boeing, I moved to Los Angeles to work for NEC America doing cell site maintenance and upgrades. And shortly afterwards, I ended up at TRW in Redondo Beach, California, courtesy of someone I used to work with at Baskin Robbins. It's strange how something seemingly innocuous such as scooping ice cream can change one's future. TRW was a great place to work and I also found Los Angeles to be a fun place to live while in my 20s and 30s. I worked with a group of modem engineers and we specialized in the development of high data rate satellite ground station receivers. These experiences at Boeing and TRW (now part of Northrop Grumman) were my formative years as an engineer and played an important part in who I am today.  And for some inexplicable reason those earlier experiences, particularly at the greenhouse and copy center, have shaped me as a person as well.