Who am I?
I’m Brad and this is my site. I write to record my views on particular subjects so that I can revisit them later and get feedback from others who are interested in the same subjects. My intention is to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
I grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles. I went to Granada Hills High School and worked part-time for a local company doing e-commerce and distribution management. I taught myself JavaScript at an early age and took classes to learn C++ and Visual Basic programming in high school.
I moved to San Diego at age 17 to attend the University of California at San Diego. I worked part-time for a local computer consulting firm while majoring in Mathematics-Computer Science for my first three years at which point I added a second major: Philosophy. I learned to program in C, Assembly, Java, Lisp and Prolog in college and taught myself PHP, Perl, SQL and Python. I took a summer internship with Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington after my fourth year of school. I had a lot of fun in Seattle and was ultimately convinced that a large company like Amazon was not for me.
In the fall of my fifth (and final) year at UCSD, I took an internship at a local startup: EVDB, Inc. I finished my degrees in the summer of 2006 and transitioned to full-time work for what is now Eventful, Inc. as Lead Web Developer. I built a strong team there and greatly enjoyed working with all of the awesome people.
Now I live in the Bay Area and work for a local startup that’s trying to change the world. I enjoy many things, but probably not as many as most other people. I like reading philosophy and philosophical novels, reading about the web, writing about the web, talking at length about subjects that require a great deal of thought, going to the beach in the summer and hanging out with my admittedly small group of close friends.
What does “h3h” mean?
Back when I was in middle school in Northridge, Calfornia, I met a guy named Michael Matsumura. This was back when IMing was just becoming popular and I had several IM conversations with Mike. His choice filler word for any break in conversation was “heh” — sometimes a small chuckle, but in this case more of an apathetic non-operative word.
I picked up the habit and started using “heh” in my conversations as well — it’s soothing for digital impatience…or something. Anyway, this continued until I was introduced to IRC a few years later by another friend and needed a nickname. Up until that point I had gone through nicknames on other services including “cyberwot”, “oohay_trix”, “The_Trixman” and “JimmyHacker” (yes, they are all embarrassing and corny, but I was in my teens).
I chose my IRC nickname from Mike’s (and then my) habit of saying “heh” all the time, but “heh” as a nickname was taken on EFNet, so I changed the ‘e’ to a ‘3’: “h3h”. This is still my nickname on EFNet (since 1999) and anywhere else I can use it.
I bought h3h.net in 2002 and my California license plate, H3H OWN in 2004. The longer form of my nickname, “h3h 0wn” (used in places where I can’t get “h3h”) is simply “[I] own” or “[I'm] awesome”. I know, modesty and everything, right?