Hey! That's Me!
Elevator Pitch
Hello, I’m Tommy, purveyor of MarshYellow.com. I’m your average tech joe writing your average personal blog. I focus on things that I find interesting–everything from healthy eating, travel, technology (and it’s impact), architecture and urban planning, transit and transportation, design, art (especially new media and street art), beer, bicycles, t-shirts, my pet rabbits, business, and just about everything else under the sun. Basically, I’m an information packrat. Most of what I do is filter the rest of the Internet so you only see the good bits and not have to slog through the lame bits (I go through several hundred blog postings on a good day to find the few gems out there). If you are looking for a blog that is geared towards one topic like .Net programming, this really isn’t the place for that….I really don’t have the discipline to limit myself to just one or two topics. Call it your “well-rounded” site that peppers you with a little of everything. Like what you hear? Then look to the upper right and subscribe to the RSS feed (or follow me on twitter since that seems to be the social media flavor of the month).
Now for the rest of it…
More about me: Originally born and raised in the awe-inspiring wasteland of the San Fernando Valley (just north of Los Angeles), capital of the adult entertainment industry and home to several teeming populations of ethnic minorities, I, like many offspring of immigrant parents in the US, have lived between two worlds. On the one hand, I was raised to be Thai: I attended Thai temple in North Hollywood every week for Thai Sunday school, went to Thai summer school at the temple, ate a LOT of Thai food, spoke Thai at home, and even joined a Thai band in my high school years. On the other hand this is America so I was American as well–my best friends growing up were from all different ethnic backgrounds (Chilean, Italian, Russian, etc). Needless to say, it was an odd dichotomy. My “Thai world” and “American world” seldom mixed. My friends from each world were basically mutually exclusive so I would switch contexts throughout my week. At the time it was natural, but looking back, it seems odd.
After high school, I attended UCLA and signed up for Computer Science and Engineering. Of course, my mom wanted me to be a doctor or something of the sort, but I wasn’t that into the blood and gore that would eventually entail. After working my way through school, I ended up working at a consulting firm for a year or so. I moved up to the Bay Area just in time for the dot com bubble to burst along with my dreams of retiring a dot com bazillionaire by the time I was 30. I worked at Microsoft’s then newly acquired WebTV project for almost 7 years before moving on to work at a small startup called Zing. Zing was an interesting animal–a fun little place that buzzed with energy and lots of big plans. We were acquired by Dell in 2007. Dell was a not so great company to work for. Sort of nickel and dimed their employees to death–understandable I suppose considering their margins are about as thin as a MacBook Air. Long story short, I’m back at Microsoft as of January 2009. I work in the Powerpoint team and it’s yet another grand learning experience for me.
My previous personal blog died a timely death in December of 2008 due to a bad server move (they moved the database and the static files, but “hello??!” wtf happened to my scripts and config files? Nice.). The rotting carcass of that site is still in place–luckily Movable Type would spit out static files for the entire site and that’s kept the whole thing up and running. I keep my old sites up and running since they still generate revenue for some odd reason. Not enough to fuel the Trump jet, but enough to pay for hosting the entire mess and a beer or two each month.
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