The site is based on Drupal and Gallery. But as you can probably tell, I really hacked them up, both on a template level and under the hood.

My goals were as follows: (1) I wanted to make it all seem like it was one site, both to viewers and to people posting on it (which meant that I made Gallery and Drupal look like each other); (2) I wanted to make it very easy for my family to use the site (which meant that I did a lot of hacking Drupal templates, and that I had to make Gallery and Drupal talk to each other); and (3) I wanted to be able to use the website to send out periodic emails to various subscription-based family and friend groups (again, a lot of hacking required to make it look nice).

I prefer to use CSS to manage layout wherever possible, and try to avoid WYSIWYG editors. Though I favor Perl, PHP, and JSP, I am open to any scripting language. I am experienced in HTML, CSS, JSP, ASP, Perl, PHP, .NET, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, RSS, XML, and XSLT.

On the non-technical side, I like to think of myself as a pretty good designer/organizer. You could say I know how to make sure my clothes match.

I try to keep good tabs on the King Henry Apt. 4 crew (Mark Andersen, Eric Anderson, Dave Thorup, Dan Hammari, and on rare occasions, even Nathan). For those that don't know, we spent three years there at King Henry. I also roomed with Mark Alexander and Dan Hammari for a while in a house in south Provo in June of 2002. But I haven't seen Mark in a year or so.

As for everyone else, it's all random meetings. For example, when I accidentally walked in front of Lybi (formerly Farnsworth)'s car in a parking lot at my sister's apartment two or so years ago while she was here for exactly one day on vacation from some place like Michigan. That's the kind of randomness we're talking about.

So who am I still in touch with, you may ask. Well, Julie mostly. Every now and then I see Jonas, who's also here in Utah. Were it not for last year's 10 year reunion, it'd have been several years or so since I saw or emailed anyone else. Honestly, I'd really like to get back in touch with people. So email me and I'll definitely get back to you really soon.

Or, click on the link below to make a comment or find more information.

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.

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 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.

I have 5+ years of experience in the industry, from building data reporting systems to website design to batch scripting. I have been coding for much longer--since my dad first brought home a Commodore 64 in the 80s. Likewise, I have been building web pages since I first got online in college (back when Netscape was still #1). I am detail-oriented, as evidenced in my preference to edit code directly instead of surrendering the code to a WYSIWYG.

Between my B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, freelance web projects (such as the site you are viewing), and my work with Corda Technologies, I have developed an extensive skill set, proving time and time again my adaptability to new technologies.

I am registered to practice before United States Patent & Trademark Office as Patent Attorney No. 58983.

I earned my Juris Doctorate from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 2007. While there, I concentrated my studies on Intellectual Property (including Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks), Telecommunications, and Antitrust. I served as Executive Editor of the BYU Education and Law Journal.

While at BYU, I became proficient with HotDocs legal document authoring software. As may therefore be expected, I also provide services related to HotDocs.

I have experience providing editing, writing, research, and on-line help services in many fields, with particular expertise in technical writing. Having earned degrees in both English and Computer Science, I excel at breaking the technical down to its essential elements and translating those elements for the masses.

From my experiences editing journals, writing patents, and producing award-winning documentation for Corda Technologies, I developed proficiency in Framemaker, Word, and Webworks, with some experience in Robohelp.