...it just pauses for a long, long time. But I still never get tired of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (even if I really, really want to put a comma there after Lake).
Sometimes there's things I want to say that frustrate the bounds of Twitter and Facebook. More often than that, though, my thoughts on certain matters never crystallize or organize themselves enough to be coherent because I'm not writing about them. So I'm trying this blogging thing again.
I've blogged before (previously at fling93.com, a site I've let lapse and now spam has grown in its place. I blogged next at Perfectly Good Ink, but that's at Typepad which charges money. I used to have money to spare in my engineering days, but nowadays it makes little sense for me to pay for something I can get for free. For anybody who misses the content on my old fling93.com site, I hope to repost the best items here at some point.
But I suppose you don't know me from Adam. Me, I'm Felix. Adam over there, he's that annoying guy from Mythbusters. Our hair looks very different, and plus I'm Asian. Taiwanese-American, to be more specific. No, Taiwan is not the source of Thai food, that's Thailand. No, this is not likely to be a blog mostly about Asian affairs, as I am one of those Asians that others sometimes derogatively call a banana. And I can't really say that I blame them. I don't really know all that much about my culture, and I usually dated white women. So sue me.
As I mentioned earlier, I used to be an engineer. I got my bachelor's in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Cal in 1993 (yes, I was one of them EECS geeks playing Netrek on the Workstations in Evans Basement all the time), and I then became a software engineer doing embedded systems programming, mostly in the wireless networking industry. I did that for fourteen years. It was fun for its time, but my love of political and economics blogs and my rather stifled creativity convinced me engineering wasn't right, and so I moved on to get a Master's in Economics at San Jose State University, finishing in 2008.
By then, the tech bubble and financial crisis had ravaged most of my engineering savings. Yeah, boo hoo me. I still had plenty more than most people, although perhaps I wasn't fully appreciative of that yet. I had thought about working within the libertarian movement in Washington D.C., but after an internship at the Cato Institute in 2007 and a rather disastrous attempt to become a Koch Associate, it became very clear that this wasn't a good fit either. So I taught Principles of Macroeconomics at SJSU for a couple of semesters, which suited me much better.
But I really needed to get out of my rut in the California Bay Area, and so I rented out my condo (one of my few remaining assets from my engineering days) and hit the road for a cross-country trip with my then-fiancée, Adrian, whom I had met during cleanup after the Burning Man festival. How I got involved with Burning Man's Department of Public Works (DPW) is a long story that I don't tell very well and, while funny, has gotten rather long in the tooth. So if you still haven't heard the whole "Missing Asian Guy" story, I'll direct you to John Curley's post and leave it at that.
Adrian and I had some adventures on that trip, which I hope to recount here at some point. We've since settled down in Austin, Texas, and about two weeks ago she gave birth to our son, Trogdor (yeah, I'll get to that story later). And of course, everything they say about how kids changes everything is absolutely true.
Nowadays, we lead a quiet and idyllic life. I make some money at home writing economic problems. Adrian practices her opera singing. We play with Trogdor and change his diapers. I take some photos and play some piano. We watch Star Trek and Buffy.
Not a whole lot to write home about. So I hope to write about different stuff. Exactly what remains to be seen.
