My wife and I have different jobs when it comes to raising my kids. I try to give them the kind of experience I had growing up, and she makes sure they stay well rounded. For example, the kids and I played Castle Crashers last night. She let them play with Play-dough and draw pictures. I bought a Spiderman shower curtain to replace the Superman one we had at our last apartment, and read them comic books before bed. She lets them watch Disney cartoons.

So far my kids have amazed me at how quickly they learn. My four year old daughter was whistling in the car the other day. I asked her who taught her how to whistle, and she said that nobody taught her. She just tried and tried, and then she could do it. She can already read Japanese hiragana and katakana, and she’s picking up English really quickly. I can show her a word, and most of the time, she can read it. And she’s surprisingly good at photography. At my brother-in-law’s wedding, she went around with my wife’s camera and took pictures of the cake that were better than the ones I got, and went around to every table asking to take a picture of the group. She ended up with great shots of almost everyone at the wedding. I took her out yesterday to take some pictures. I told her that if she has a good time taking pictures, and her pictures turn out well, I’ll buy her her own camera. I’ve already started looking online for it.

My middle son has picked up my love for super heroes. I’m a DC man myself, but I’m fine with him thinking that Spiderman is awesome. There was a period of a couple of months that he would only pick out his Superman t-shirts to wear for the day. If they were both dirty, he’d wear something else, but as soon as they came out of the dryer, he would change. The coolest thing is that he picks stuff up when I’m not around, and then tells me all about them. He watched a Justice League cartoon, and when I came home from work, he told me about a guy who wears a red suit, and runs like this, and waved his hands really fast past his head. Now he likes the Flash.

My youngest still hasn’t done anything amazing beyond what a 10-month old would normally do. I’ve got high hopes, though. After all, I still need a bassist on Rock Band.

I’ve been with Microsoft for almost six months now as the Academic Developer Evangelist for Northern California. In that time, I’ve ran some pretty big events, helped some other teams out with whatever they need, traveled all around the United States, and learned a lot about Microsoft and my region.

So what do I do as an Academic Developer Evangelist? My primary function is to get students excited about technology. I do this in a few ways. For example, I’ve run Xbox gaming parties, worked with student groups to improve membership, and given presentations to crowds of students. My biggest event so far would have to have been the Innovation Day event at San Francisco City College, in which I gave a talk on trends in technology to around 800 students. Not all of the events I’ve taken part of have been that size, though. My smallest would probably be a one hour presentation I gave to a single student and two instructors.

Outside of work, I spend my time playing Xbox with my kids, experimenting with digital photography, participating in the RPGA with the new 4th edition rules, and programming games with XNA and for the web with Silverlight. Expect to hear more about those topics. Especially photography. That one has been a pretty big time sink lately.

Welcome to my blog, thanks for coming out.