About

Welcome to my corner on the web! You’re here to learn a little bit about me so here goes…

When and how did I get here?

I’ve been a spectator and participant in many things ‘online’ since 1992, when I joined the Seattle Community Network and got my first taste of the Internet. I had an email account, surfed the web back when the web was a small part of the Internet, read newsgroups, and generally became fluent in the all things online.

Why am I here?

It has been amazing to see how far things have come along, but there’s much work left to do to realize what I believe are the real goals of technology: break down barriers between people across the world, foster creativity and expression from individuals that might not have otherwise had the opportunity, and simply make people’s lives easier. I can recall writing in my college essays something about wanting to pursue engineering because I believed technology had fallen short of realizing its potential in many avenues and of its ultimate goal: easing people’s lives. Technology should not just be about knowledge, as it is classically defined, it should be about knowledge with a purpose.

Where have I been?

I grew up in Bellevue, Washington just across the way from Seattle. I love the Pacific Northwest and look forward to moving back there sometime in the future. I attended Stanford University for my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I contemplated graduate school, but moved on to the working world. After I started working, I decided to pick up school part-time and completed my master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Software Engineering.

Who am I?

I’m sure I don’t have a conclusive answer to this question, but I can summarize what I have learned so far.

• I am lucky to have married a great woman and to have the best friends around me anyone could ask for.
• I like to learn and find myself on a continuous voyage of reading, learning and experimenting.
• I love music, an eclectic mix of hip hop, rap, r&b, soul, Motown, house, classical, south asian classical and south asian fusion.
• I am the only son of Indian immigrants who came to this country in the 1970′s, worked hard and sacrificed to give me many opportunities. Straddling two cultures, specifically Indian and American, is a unique life experience.
• I love cars. I love going for drives through the twisties in my car.
• I’m a big sports fan, especially Seattle sports team. Football, basketball, baseball, tennis and soccer are the main sports I follow.
• I have a watch fetish. I own two pieces I absolutely love and secretly lust after this one.
• I have discovered there are online forums/communities for everything. I sporadically participate in two: one for cars and one for watches.
• I love food to an extent where I will pick restaurants to eat at based on the chef behind it.
• I love the escapism from watching movies and have rated more than I’m proud to admit on Netflix.
• I am an opinionated guy but I listen to and value what everyone has to say.

I’ll continue to update this section over time but that’s it for now.

Contact Me

If you need to contact me regarding content in a particular post, please leave a comment and I will get back to you directly or in that post itself.

A Fine Balance? Rohinton Mistry fan or something?

Actually, yes. But the title of this blog is drawn from the balance I try to strike between a technical and nontechnical interests.