A Quick Biography

I grew up in San Jose, California, with my younger siblings Peter, David, and Julia. I was a computer geek very early on, and my parents had the foresight to get me a Timex Sinclair 1000 and eventually a Commodore 64, on which I taught myself how to program. At Bellarmine College Prep, I divided my time between academics, speech and debate, chess, publishing a science fiction newsletter, and other wacky activities.

I then attended U.C. Berkeley, graduating with a computer science degree. At Cal, I was active in Catholic campus ministry at Newman Hall and grew in my interest for liturgical music and pastoral ministry. I also lived at a housing cooperative named Cloyne Court with 150 other Cal students, where I had the job of coordinating the five hour per week "workshifts" to get meals cooked, keep the place clean, and maintain some semblance of order.

After graduating, I landed a job at the now pretty much defunct Geoworks, where I initially worked on an operating system that was competing with Windows but later on mobile phone technology. Within a year, I noticed that Jesse Manibusan was leading music at St. Barnabas parish and decided to make it my new faith community, where I helped with music and a variety of other ministries.

This got me to move to Alameda, a city with some unique charm and a lot of Victorian houses. I became active in the Alameda-wide Catholic young adult ministry, and an opportunity to share some of what I experienced at Newman brought me to St. Joseph parish where I helped adapt the Sunday evening service to its largely young adult audience. I helped lead music (with great songs such as these), before moving on to general liturgy work and stewardship.

I began taking some summer courses at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley before enrolling at the Franciscan School of Theology member school. I'm now six years into the two year Master in Theological Studies program. I'm almost through, as I have been taking only one class per semester, while working full-time.

After over seven years (and an awful lot of failed business plans), Geoworks laid me off. I was fortunate enough to almost immediately find a job with a bunch of Geoworks alums at Access, also working on server side software for mobile phones. I now do similar work at Digital Chocolate, where we produce games for mobile phones. You can learn more about my professional software work here

I have been active in a number of organizations, including Pax Christi USA and Call To Action. I continue to be involved in pastoral ministry at St. Joseph, working on efforts to tie discipleship with daily experience through themes such as simple living and gift-based spirituality. I also host a number of websites, which you can see on my main webpage here.