Poopman: Difference between revisions

== Autobiography (written several years ago but edited recently) ==

It was not uncommon to see people who had died in the alleyway of my apartment complex or in their car, usually caused by gang-related problems or drug overdoses. I could see their dim, sunken eyes and pale cheeks. I could smell the distinctive, pungent stench of rotting flesh.

When I think back on this, I am reminded how lucky I am to have escaped this dark place.

School provided somewhat of a temporary escape from the dangers of my neighborhood and the troubles at home. I tried my best to learn anything I could. Learning was a distraction from the hunger pains I would often feel in the pit of my stomach. I equated success in school with the potential for success in life.

Although the day started out problematic, a kid from my class saw what happened to me.   He was able to console me with something unexpected. He took his binder out and handed to me, on a piece of notebook paper, a drawing of an amazingly detailed dinosaur. I immediately forgot about the woes of my love life and found a new love. That day, I learned that I wanted to draw, and I wanted to draw well.

This event began my fascination with tracing. I traced the dinosaur picture I was given. I proudly showed the little boy what I had accomplished but was disappointed when I saw what he accomplished; he created many more amazing images. I was only able to reproduce his original drawing.

I was determined to draw something of my own. I imagined a dragon with a long, snakelike body, whiskers on both sides of its mouth that flowed down its face, and short, stubby arms with large claws for hands. I tried to draw the image that I imagined. Much to my disappointment, the drawing did not look like a dragon.

He asked the class to emulate every stroke he made on the chalkboard, consisting of curves, lines, and ovals. Mr. Baker guided me to make my first drawing: I drew Fred from The Flintstones. I realized that I did not need to look at an entire picture to draw. Instead, I copied each line until the image developed itself.  

"Quiet, the kids are sleeping," she said with an angry face.

I paid no attention to her warnings. I walked in, kicked my shoes off, and threw my backpack into the middle of the living room. I pulled out my English folder and showed her the drawing of Fred.  

"Mom, come over here!" I whispered.

She looked and started to smile, whispering back, "when I was your age, I wanted to draw too." Her smile faded, and she continued, "I would show Grandpa and Grandma my drawings, but they always told me it was a waste of time, and I wouldn’t be successful."

She regretfully listened to my grandparents. Without any motivation for learning, she dropped out of high school and ran a children’s daycare without being licensed. My dad also had a knack for the arts but could not keep up with the technology. He eventually stopped pursuing art and got a job as a pizza delivery driver.

When I thought of my parents, I thought of their failures. I would feel embarrassed for them, and I felt ashamed. I wanted to be as different from them as I could. I worked hard to master my craft.

In middle school, I learned about different art techniques such as drafting or perspective. When I reached high school, technology began to boom. I had to learn how to adapt my art from freehand drawings over to computer graphics.

By my senior year, I became the "go-to" student when it came to computer design. On Fridays, I would stay after school to show my teachers about the new tools and techniques that I learned using the Adobe drawing programs. My teachers and I became friends. They mentored me and nurtured my drawing skills. My educators may have seen me as a great student; I saw them as family. They encouraged me to pursue higher education.

Throughout my time in high-school, as a way to stay away from my house, I would attend a kung fu and lion dancing temple called "Teo Chew Temple" in Houston. The temple was free, but they were very strict and did very traditional practices. I would often stay way past closing because I realized if I was there long enough they would feed me.

As for lion-dancing that was one of my favorite things to do. It was challenging, and being one of the few to use the competition stands was a source of pride. Going here often is how I ended up learning some Cantonese (a dialect of Chinese).

In 2007, graduating high school was a great accomplishment, but I decided not to walk during graduation. I felt that I would deserve to walk as soon as I graduated from college.

My parents did not encourage higher education. I confessed to my parents that I wanted to attend college. I was their first and only child of ten to pursue higher education. They felt that what I learned from college would not be worth the costs. I offered to pay for college myself, so they agreed.

The school was private, and it was expensive. Even though I received many grants for living in a low-income house, I still owed monthly payments to the school. I found a job across the street from my college at Hollister. I was five dollars short on tuition every month, so my dad graciously helped me with the payment.

Although tuition was paid for, I did not realize how expensive all the art supplies, food, and bus fares would be. In order to finish assignments, I would go into the paper cutting room at my school to find scraps of paper to use for my projects.

Most days, if I was lucky, I could find change and buy a loaf of bread from the gas station to eat on the five mile walk home. The Art Institute also had a culinary school; the school threw away all of the baked food for the weekend. On Fridays, I feasted on all the thrown out baked sandwiches, pastas, and cakes.

The Art Institute wickedly added $10,000 to my debt overnight and kicked me out of school until I paid it back. They would also hold all transcripts from me until that happened.

At around the same time, I met my fiancée Diana through a mutual friend. Diana grew up in a low income household with many siblings, so she related with my struggles. Unfortunately, she lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. After a year of being in a long-distance relationship, I decided to move to Cincinnati in hopes of a better life.

Anyways, unlike my parents, Diana urged me to go back to school at DAAP because she saw my talent and potential, just like my high school art teachers.

=== Back to college ===

At twenty-four years old, I began my freshman year as a college student again. My major would be The Science of Communication Design.  In other words, graphic design. In comparison to my childhood apartment complex, my current apartment sits on a safe, quiet street in Clifton.

Because I was older than most of my peers and struggled to get back into college, I took my education a lot more seriously than the fresh-out-of-high-school students. I think that was a blessing, helping me stay focused and vigilant.

Fast forward a few years and I chose Interaction Design as my focus within my major, which was a mix between User Interface design, User Experience design, and coding. After a few more years (it was a 5 year degree) I graduated top-of-my-class at DAAP.

During my years there, we did a few co-ops, and one of those co-ops was an engineering firm which ended up hiring me as a full time employee.

In 2016/18, the engineering firm branched out to virtual reality with me as the main artist and level designer. The firm was only using Unity at the time, and Unreal did not have VR capabilities yet. I learned Unity and had the firm start to branch out into Unreal as well.

A few years later, the firm got further into machine learning and placed me into the newly built machine learning group. The purpose was to find ways to generate synthetic data.

At the same time, one of the directors wanted me to work on making a "product viewer". I went to them with the idea of creating a machine learning-based product viewer, where you could take a few products, give them randomized positions, rotations, color textures, lighting, backgrounds, etc., and use that with some JSON data to train machine learning models. I developed the product for about a year.

It was patented, and I became a named inventor of the first synthetic data generation platform.

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