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Various pics

My name is and I've led an interesting full life I suppose and since you're here I'll share with you a little more about me.

I was born on April 5th, 1974, in Monroe, Michigan to Bangladeshi parents. My family left Michigan when I was 7 to move to Sugar Land, Texas (outside of Houston) and specifically First Colony. I went to Clements High School and did well enough there to gain admittance to the University of Texas at Austin. I studied Electrical Engineering there and graduated in the spring of '96. I also worked for one full year as co-op at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). At the time of my graduation AMD was not doing very well so I took a job with Standard Microsystems Corporation (SMSC) which is where I was employed until March 13th, 1998. Then I worked for a small startup company in north Austin called International Meta Systems (IMS) doing design work on a DSP chip. After about 5 months at IMS, the company went bankrupt and I was suddenly out of a job. I then worked for The Silicon Group. They offered full contract design services along with consulting and training. There were only 12 people in the company and I was really excited to be working there and planned to be there for awhile. They were bought out by Synopsys in July, 2000 so then I went to work for them. We did not have enough work to keep our team of consultants busy and I was laid off by them on December 5th, 2002. At that point I explored doing some things other than straight up chip design. My good friend Sanjay gave me opportunities to do some web development through one his companies Nion Interactive which was fun since I'd never done that type of work professionally before. My main contribution was on email campaign management software with many Austin clients, particularly in the food and beverage. That's nice since I like good food and beverages. :) I also started working with his EDA (chip design software) distribution company, Silicon Software, and this was a much better fit with my chip design background. Now I'm working directly for one of his supplier's, Zenasis Technologies, an EDA software company headquartered in the Bay Area of California. So that's made me spend a lot of time out there and it's been fun to explore Palo Alto, San Francisco, and the wealth of activities and beautiful geography along with making some new lifelong friends. Austin will always be my home though. For Zenasis I help them in multiple ways, by assisting their sales team as an engineering resouce to perform pre-sales evaluations for potential customers, building infrastructure so this company can grow, and doing anything else needed to make them sucessful.

I like living in Austin and there's a poster (Silicon Hills) available that has a map of Austin with logos of the numerous computer technology oriented companies on it. Since SMSC's Austin design center is relatively small (<20 people) a small picture of me is on the poster on the 1997 and 1998 versions. Now that I've left SMSC I'm on the 2000 year poster with the Silicon Group.  Working for Synopsys in a large office means I wasn't on the calendar for them.

Things are good for electrical engineering graduates, I get paid well for a job I like and they are very flexible on working hours and attire. The job has allowed me to buy a new car along with plenty of other toys. If you have an interest in understanding how things work then I strongly suggest some kind of engineering. It's been very rewarding to me.

I took a cool class in college on the Internet and we learned how to write HTML code to create web pages like this one. For my final project I created a web site about car audio (one of my hobbies) which started off as a school project but has turned into a good resource on the web. It has received a quarter million  "hits" and I get plenty of email requesting help on car audio. Early in 2000 I started accepting advertising on it to turn it into a real business whose proceeds I mainly use to pay for kegs for my kegerator at home.  I have sent and received several thousand email helping people with car audio. In addition I have received an offer to be a guest speaker to an electronics class. The site has also been mentioned in a car audio magazine and is listed on all of the major search engines.

I was born April 5, 1974 but I still think you can have fun even with serious job responsibilities. That's why you'll find out enjoying Austin and living in the Warehouse District downtown. Check out my Austin bar review page.

I've lived in Austin for decades. My old roommate Russ got me into digital cameras a few years back and I have a web site that describes the sets of ~25000 pictures I've taken.

I am very fortunate and I hope everyone enjoys life as much as I do! Cheers!