About Me

I was born in Seoul, South Korea, back in 1966. Due to the economic turmoil at the time my parents decided to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1970. As I was four at the time, I had no idea that big flying things could take you so far away from where you were born.

We lived in Argentina until 1977, escaping the era of "Los desaparecidos" and the Falkland War (Guerra de las islas Malvinas) on July 2, and landing in LAX on July 3, one day before Independence Day. This time, I had some ideas of what an airplane was but I still didn't understand my parents penchance for escaping doomed economies.

I grew up in the heat of Los Angeles until I could escape, but I think I escaped in the wrong direction: Instead of heading north toward milder weather, I headed south beyond the "Orange Curtain".

Out of all the universities and colleges I could go to, my parents made me go to USC because CSUN was not up to their standards. Or so I believed. After suffering a year of being treated like a pauper because my parents didn't make at least a quarter of a million dollars a year, I decided I had to transfer. This is where I made one of my many mistakes.

I should have fled north, but ended going even further south into the heart of Orange County, to UC Irvine. Here, I learned how to spell Comparative Literature and learned to love the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Mikhail Bulgakov, and even Vladimir Nabokov. This is where I published my only thing I ever published in a student run "Chicano" publication, a sonet which I have thankfully lost.

And let no one tell you that four years of college is a waste, for I became smart and headed north to San Francisco to enroll at SFSU to further my skill and knowledge of Literature and the fine arts.

As all grad students will tell you, life is bleak. And so it was for the next six years of my life trying to finish something I should have finished in two. From 1991 to 1996, I was dead set on trying to get my Masters of Arts in Comparative Literature, which words now I could spell like a professional, only to find that in 1995 my mind decided to retreat onto itself.

Taking a not so sanction year leave from SFSU, I enrolled at Middlebury College's Languages Program so I could take a year vacation in Spain. It was here in Spain that I became heavily involved and enamoured of Gnostic theology, having read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, all books written by the Gnostically Psychotic Philip K. Dick (now famous because Arnold portrayed one of his characters).

It was during this year vacation of debauchery, drinking, and other illicit activities (well, not illicit in Spain, of course) that I became aware that I really didn't want to do what I was doing, beside the fact that no doctorate program wanted the likes of me. This is when I decided that machines were better than people. I was prepared to be assimilated.

When I finally graduated from SFSU, I was the proud owner of two Masters degrees, one in Comparative Literature, and one in Spanish (this was from Middlebury College). I had two degrees which offered no financial security unless I would go do higher scholastic activities, like write books about books, which was not an option anymore.

In a flash of random access memory activity, I enrolled at City College of San Francisco and began to take computer courses. First by studying hardware, then by learning how to control it by programming languages. As a student of literature, I had no problems in converting my knowledge of human tongues into machine understandable language. All languages have syntax and vocabulary, and programming languages were not exempt from this paradigm.

And that was the last stage of my mental development. Now I'm stuck here on this web page and can't get out.