Biography

• Born: July 8, 1977 in Salt Lake City, UT
• Died: July 8, 2177 on Mars
• Claimed Hometown: Austin, TX
• Current Residence: San Jose, CA
• Other Places I've lived: Washington, D.C. (actually, Manassas, VA), Utah, Syndey, Australia, Grafton, Australia, and Brisbane, Australia
• Occupation:Patent Attorney
• Past Occupations: Technical Writer & Software Developer
• Gender: Male
• Height: 6'0"
• Weight: 185 lbs. (ideally)
• Eye color: Blue
• Donor: Yes
• Marital Status: Very Happily Married
• Wife's Name: Angela
• Son's Name: Thomas
• Where I Was When They Shot JFK: You mean the movie, right?
• One Thing I'm Doing Now That, 10 Years Ago, I Didn't Think I'd Be Doing Now: Cycling to work three times a week.
• List of Places I've yet to See Before I Die: Nome, Alaska; Antarctica; Ankor Wat; Iceland; South Africa; Alice Springs, Australia; Tazmania; Greenland

I'm married to a beautiful woman named Angela. She and I met in 2003 going to the Shakespearean Festival. A year and a half later, we got married in Salt Lake City. She's from Utah, mostly, although she spent a few years in places like North Carolina and California. She worked as a senior financial reporting analyst for 8 years until we had our first son Thomas. Both of them are an absolute joy to spend time with. We keep a website together at http://karlandangela.reeshome.org

I was born on what I can only presume was a splendidly hot and sunny summer's afternoon in Salt Lake City, Utah. Up until my 18th birthday I was fortunate enough to have lived all but 6 months of my life in Austin, Texas, the greatest city on the planet. So I consider myself, to this day, a Texan. No, I don't have a Texan accent. At best, it's Australinized Texas-Vietnamese-Utahn with German influence. Nevertheless, Texas rocks.

If you're familiar with Austin, I grew up on the northeast side, barely within city limits, in a not-at-all-mystical suburb called Copperfield (just south of Pflugerville). In 2001, my parents--two delightful persons I really love (does saying that make up for the infrequency with which I call them?)--moved out of the area and into a nice, big house in Manassas, Virginia with a huge backyard. This is in stark contrast to the very small, three-bedroom house in which we lived while I was growing up. Three small bedrooms, two parents, and six kids. You do the math. But no resentment here. Just the facts. Anyway, here's their story (thrown into a word-cruncher and spewed out again into two paragraphs).

My dad, Brigham Dean Rees, grew up in Odessa, Texas, where it's very flat and dry and smells like petroleum. He met my mom at BYU when he was 26. They were very quickly married. For the longest time, he worked at Motorola as a test engineer. Then he took a job with a next-generation wireless networking company in Virginia. That company, ironically, was then bought by Motorola. And then they spun it off as FreeScale, and they moved him back to Austin. It makes your mind spin. Besides being the biggest scouting enthusiast I've ever known, he turned our former house into a paradise for the local high school science team, with bottle rockets and electrical gadgets hiding in the strangest places. And he's good at it--you should see his bottle rockets fly. Anyway, he's, well, dad, and he's taught me that the more you tinker with something, the sooner it breaks. This is why I try not to mow my lawn.

My mom, Diane Rose (Nissen) Rees grew up in mostly in Austin, which I think is part of the reason we lived there most of our lives. Her parents, both German immigrants, still live there (out towards Anderson Mill), and the thing I like most about visiting them (besides their company of course) is salami sandwhiches on sourdough rye. And buttercream cake. My mom had a full-time job for a while, trying to manage six annoying but somehow cute and lovable kids. When this bored her, she used to do a lot of volunteer work at school libraries. Now that we're all gone, she works at Target in Austin, and is finishing up college on the side. She loves reading and watching Star Trek and sci-fi and fantasy and mysteries like Murder She Wrote. This explains why sometimes when nobody's looking I'll turn the TV on and watch Star Trek.

Yes, there's half a dozen children in the family. Meaning we grew up in one crowded but extremely interesting little house. Most of us proclaim to be geniuses or geeks or something like that. I'm fully expecting someone (like our English teacher Mrs. Watson, who has was involved in the education of five of us) to one day write a pyscho-analysis of us that will boggle the world's mind. Until then, suffice it to say that I'm the oldest child, and as such, I had a big hand in making the rest of the family as weird as they are (evil laugh). Actually, though, I think my effect was minimal. A lot of their weirdness is their own doing.

First there's Chris, who's a year and a half younger than me. The most important fact about him is that I can school him on the basketball court. I just choose not to, most of the time. It's also important to note that he doesn't understand that the Lakers are pure evil. He graduated from BYU in Economics, got a Masters from the University of Virginia, and then earned an MBA from Wake Forest. They just gave birth to their second son. His wife, Katie, grew up in Utah, and graduated in English from BYU.

Then there's Becky, who's three years younger than me and married to this guy named Wayne. They're both monkeys. Becky's also totally not smarter than half the faculty (inside joke, please laugh). She plays the organ, graduated from BYU in Physics with an emphasis in Computer Science, and is mainly interested in Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition. She went out to Michigan to do this type of work, but was laid-off. Strangely enough, she didn't care because she met Wayne (who does art--see http://art.waynemadsen.com). Now, after earning a masters in Computer Science at BYU, she works in San Jose and takes turn with Wayne (who's earning his MFA) taking care of their daughter, Paela. They keep a website at http://www.waynemadsen.com.

Amy is four years younger than me and has wisely chosen to become a caterer and feed me for the rest of my life. Well, that was my dream at least. She graduated from BYU-Idaho (or, as she insists on calling it, Ricks). She's now living in Austin and recently retired from managing a Marriott hotel. She's a Julia Roberts aficionado and has great tastes in interior design.

Susie is six years younger than me and likes to drive mom crazy. She stayed in Austin to go to the University of Texas and study English. She wants to do editing, journalism, or creative writing. Like I, she loves to write poetry. She recently moved to Seattle, where she works as an administrative assistant at a large national bank.

And finally, we have the youngest and supposedly smartest of all, Bryan. After shocking everyone as valedictorian of his high school in Virginia, he went to BYU for a year, and is soon heading out on his mission. For some reason, he spends all of his time next to a computer. Er, wait, I do that too. The contrast between his tastes in music and the collection of all music that I've ever even heard is living proof that I'm getting old.

And that's everything you ever wanted to know about my family. Except for the fact that one day we're going to take over the world. That's all.

I attended some unknown and forgotten Austin elementary school for kindergarten, went to Pflugerville Elementary for 1st through 4th grades, and then to Dessau Elementary for 5th grade. (Okay, this may be a bit boring, but you asked for it. Or someone did). I was in the inaugaral class of Westview Middle School and then moved on to the best High School to have ever existed, Pflugerville High School.

After graduating high school in 1995, I enrolled at Brigham Young University (why? Because I'm a Mormon. Why else would someone actually move from Texas to Utah?) on a wonderful Trustees scholarship which I sucked dry as evidenced by foolish attempts to take enough courses in one semester to graduate me three times over. I had a blast my Freshman year, living in Merrill Hall with 40 other groovy guys. Then I actually started to go to class. I graduated with University Honors in English and Computer Science (double major) in August 2001. The English--creative writing--is what I am most passionate about. The Computer Science, which I at least somewhat enjoy, is there just for the money.

I should probably include the two years I spent away from school in Sydney, Australia as part of my education, since I learned a lot about life and myself. I was a missionary, and learned Vietnamese (learn being a very relative word) so I could work with Vietnamese immigrants. For anyone familiar with Australia, I spent most of my time in the Sydney suburbs of Bankstown, Cabramatta, and Fairfield, and in the Brisbane suburb of Inala. I also spent a short time in a small city about 12 hours north of Sydney called Grafton. I've posted some pictures from my mission on this website.

I earned a J.D. at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU in 2007. I focused on Intellectual Property, Antitrust, and Telecommunications. I didn't even know that I wanted to study law until, on a whim, the year before I started school, I aced the LSAT. But I looked at people who have really cool jobs or who I really respect, and most of them have law degrees, so I thought "why not me?"

So I guess that's it on the education. Unless maybe I go back and get a PhD in computer science (artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, systems modeling) or an MFA in Creative Writing. I'd love to be a student forever! (My wife starts hitting me whenever I say that).

I currently work as a Patent Attorney in San Jose, CA, with the law firm Hickman Palermo Truong & Becker. I provide legal services to the software industry, particularly in intellectual property.

I did various consulting jobs while earning a law degree. I also had a few legal internships in D.C. (telecommunicatiosn firm), Salt Lake (IP firm), and San Jose (software patents). You can read more about my career history and ambitions on my Consulting page.

Prior to law school, I had a variety of jobs, doing tech writing for Brigham Young University for a semester, tech support and maintenance at the University of Texas' Advanced Research Laboratories for a summer, and finally working at Corda Technologies, where I wrote documentation, ran training seminars, nagged developers about product design, and wrote a lot of code.

Jumping back in time, I served my mandatory years in food preparation as a teenager, preparing snow-cones for 3 years, and embezzling ice cream and donuts into my stomach at Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts for 2 years. I went through a flurry of jobs right after high school: selling knives for 2 weeks, pretending I like to be nice to restaurant patrons for about 2 months, and finally pushing little buttons on a cash register at Best Buy. The sno-cones were undoubtedly the best, in case you're wondering.

Writing is by far my most passionate hobby, especially poetry. I'm trying to write novels and screenplays, but I have a serious problem with my attention span, namely that I can't find it. I've put some of my writings on this web site, so humor me and click here to read them.

Sports also consumes a perhaps too significant part of my time. I love playing Ultimate Frisbee, and play in leagues and tournaments when time permits. I also love basketball and volleyball, both of which I've listed as my favorite sports in the past--back in what I like to call B.F. (before frisbee; i.e. about the year 2000). I love to watch baseball (go Rangers!), though I'm not very good at it. I collected a lot of baseball cards as a kid. Though I like real football, I'm not a American football fan, except for maybe the Texas Longhorns.

I love the outdoors--especially mountains, desserts, and oceans. Hiking and camping are some of my favorite things to do, but not when it's too cold.

Music is always entertaining. I love to sing (bass, or baritone if I drink a lot of orange juice before hand), and am regularly involved in church choirs. I love classical, jazz, blues, classical guitar, rock, bluegrass, Sting, Dave Matthews Band, Tori Amos, and Smashing Pumpkins.

This website also probably makes it obvious that I spend way too much time with computers. You can blame my father for that. I think he must have put one in my crib when I was ten months old. I pretty much enjoy doing anything with computers. I love to build them, especially multimedia or home theater systems (I use Meedio). I try to keep up to speed with the latest programming technologies (particularly on the web side). On the research side, I'm intrigued by AI, systems modeling, machine learning, and networking.

I love to keep up with the latest in Physics and Astronomy, although I haven't had time to pursue my ambition of becoming an amateur astronomer. And then there's history and archaeology and political science and so on--basically I'd be a Discovery Channel/TLC/History channel nut if I had time to watch TV.

I've been known to play a computer game from time to time (simulation games like the Civilization series--I'm not a big fan of shoot-em-up games or RPGs). Back when I was younger, I used to enjoy games like Hero's Quest and Ultima 7 and Descent. But those days are past. I love Mario Kart! That and Dr. Mario are my sole reasons for owning any sort of video gaming console.

But most importantly, I love spending time with my wife. We love to travel to places. And we love to take pictures wherever we go. We love to go to the theatre (and to the movie theater as well). We love to take walks together or fly kites or play mini-golf or go bowling or... well, you get the picture.

Rhodes Scholar. Well, no, not really. But why not. I'm smart enough.
And dammit, people like me. Or at least some of them like my poetry. But in high school I came in second for "Most Likely to Succeed" (no, I'm not bitter). And I once found the golden ticket in my Wonka bar and got to jump in a river of melted chocolate while little people sang and danced. Oh, and I think I had a few scholastic achievements somewhere in the past. They were really impressive. Trust me on this.

Here's some things I couldn't fit elsewhere:

• I took three years of German in High School and still can't speak a sentence with any degree of ease.
• I took two years of piano when I was a kid and now the only thing I know how to do is play by ear.
• I love the outdoors, especially hiking and camping. I've been on several two-week long hikes through the mountains of northern New Mexico. Now, what I don't love is backpacking food.
• I was captain of my high school computer science and math teams (okay, stop it with the nerd jokes already).
• NPR rocks! You go, Diane Reem! Don't worry, I'll donate to you guys someday.
• I'm not particularly fond of snow, and for that reason, I'm living in Utah. Wait, that doesn't make sense.
• Aliens kidnapped me when I was 12 years old.
• I'm addicted to chocolate. All kinds really. Dark in particular. It's good for you. Really.

Well, I'm done talking about me, I guess. What an ending! But before you go, please humor me a little more and check out my Favorites and Links lists. I know, I know, it seems like a rather juvenile thing for a grown man to put on a web page, but as my wife can verify, I'm a pretty juvenile guy.