I finally did an Ironman triathlon on April 9, 2005 in Arizona. Surprisingly enough, it was hard. I finished the swim in 23rd overall (out of 1600, including the pros). I think at one point I was leading the race overall - there was a helicopter right over my head and a boat crusing along next to me. I had an ok bike, but the wind took a lot out of me - tall guys are a little less aero than average. And of course I was severely undertrained for my first marathon. But I managed to pull it off, and just broke the half day mark - crossed the line at 11 hours and 57 minutes.

After I graduated from Caltech, I spent nine months working and learning in the first year of the Caltech/Art Center/NSF Entrepreneurial Fellowship Program. This was sort of a mini business school, with a very entrepreneurial, practical slant. We wrote business plans, interviewed potential customers, and developed products that potentially could have reached the market. Overall, a superbly valuable experience. I worked with Joey Jones, who is now doing some really impressive filmmaking.

I worked for a startup called Starseed. We were making an internet accelerator called Bullet, back in the days of the dialup modem. I came onboard to implement wavelet image compression for recompressing cached web images, which was actually working pretty well. I told Sage that he should bring WebRing to Starseed. He did, and Starseed got bought by GeoCities, which got bought by Yahoo!. And then both Bullet and WebRing pretty much died. That's my dot-com story.

Will, Sage, and I started a game company when I was in my senior year of high school. After working on it for years, we released Cydonia on CD-ROM in 1998. It certainly had its problems, but it wasn't a bad game; unfortunately, the business side of things didn't go so well. We released the DVD version in 2000 (the publisher changed the name to Lightbringer), which was how the game should have been in the first place. Much better graphics, fewer bugs, etc. Unfortunately I think we'd already lost our chance, and it never really sold much. We did get a few good reviews.

This book was written mostly by people from the newsgroup rec.games.programmer. I wrote a couple silly chapters for it when I was in high school. But hey, I was published!