This page is intended to give you a short overview of who I am and what I've done. For more detail, well, you'll just have to get to know me. Or dig up a previous version of this page via the Wayback Machine.
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First of all, no, I don't speak a word of French. My father is French Canadian and my parents were/are hippies, hence the name.
The story I will relate here mainly follows my educational history, because getting educated was my main activity during the first 31 years of my life. There were fits and starts due to financial problems, and of course there were lots of other influential things going on in my life, but this is about how I got to where I am today (wherever that may be).
I was born in Vancouver at 2am on March 20, 1972. During my childhood we moved around a lot, partly because my father's work (construction) was unsteady and partly to avoid hassles from school authorities. You see, my parents educated me at home. This was a frowned-upon thing to do at the time, especially since we weren't following the recommended curriculum. Actually, it was probably bordering on illegal at times. All told, I've lived for some length of time in six Canadian provinces, most of them more than once.
I'm glad my parents home-schooled me. I think it's a generally beneficial thing. It can go horribly wrong though, because it enables children to be unduly influenced by the attitudes of their parents by reducing exposure to other viewpoints.
I must admit that my early education suffered in some areas. I still have little formal knowledge of history and none at all of chemistry. On the other hand, my math skills were good and my language skills excellent.
There was a big advantage to being home-schooled: I didn't have to suffer long hours in uncomfortable, ugly, mind-stifling schools and I didn't have to put up with crap from my peers. I rarely put in more than three hours of schoolwork per day, I never had to do the humiliating, trauma-inducing rituals I always hear public school kids get put through, and I never had to be just like everyone else.
When I was 16 we had just moved to Toronto and I had finished my equivalent-to-grade-12, though I have no papers to prove it. I had developed an interest in electronics and took a 1-year certificate course in Microprocessor Systems at George Brown College. I finished the course over a month early because it was independent study. Being plunked into such an alien and demanding environment taught me how to learn quickly.
My marks were excellent and I had become even more interested in the subject, so I decided to take another course. I took a two-year diploma course in Electronics Engineering Technology. I graduated with honors, and met my first batch of quality friends in the process.
Unfortunately, in my absence George Brown seems to have devolved into a diploma mill. They're now advertising on television like some common mail order school. How embarrassing. But on the other hand, education in general seems to be suffering in Canada these days.
While in that EET course, I had to do an assignment using the C programming language on an XT computer. I had never programmed an IBM-compatible before, nor even seen an example of C code. I had a month to write an on-screen scientific calculator program with as many extras as I could cram in. So I spent a week in bookstores looking for a good C book, found it and read it cover to cover. I've been doing nearly all my programming in C ever since.
After graduating from electronics, it was time for me to pick a career theme to guide my future education. I knew I wanted to do something related to my favorite eye candy - computer graphics a la Tron - and my favorite pastime, electronic gaming. I looked into Computer Science at Waterloo, but I couldn't get in there with my GBC diploma. U of T didn't appeal to me. I looked into Sheridan's respected Computer Graphics program and into art courses at the Ontario College of Art. Nothing really grabbed me.
Then in early 1992 the economy crashed in Toronto and my parents lost their jobs. Toronto being expensive as it was, we had to leave. With the last of our money and credit limits we moved back to Manitoba, where we had bought a small 80 acre farm years before during the Calgary oil boom. Ten years later we were still paying off debts from that move from Toronto. Lousy economists, causing recessions like that!
There wasn't much work to be had in Manitoba. After nearly a year of casting about - and one false start out to Vancouver - we moved back to Calgary. Part of the reason was that by this time (early 1993), I had decided that computer programming was my thing and I wanted to take Comp Sci at a university.
I had already been refused at Waterloo because my GBC diploma wasn't equivalent to Ontario Grade 13. My second choice was Simon Fraser, so we took that abortive jaunt out to Vancouver. Because of car trouble on the way, we couldn't afford to stay long enough in Vancouver to get money coming in steadily, so we had to return to Manitoba. At the time I wasn't hot on the idea of borrowing extra money to live in residence by myself, and I'm glad I didn't.
It turns out that if we hadn't had that car trouble, I wouldn't have met the bunch of quality friends I picked up in Calgary. Sometimes small random events lead to big positive results.
Back to the story. I had been refused entry into Waterloo and couldn't stay in Ontario anyway. I had been accepted at Simon Fraser but couldn't stay there either. My third choice, institution-wise, was the University of Calgary. We were able to find work in Calgary, so we moved there. I discovered that Mount Royal college offered the equivalent of U of C's first two years of Comp Sci for a lower price and with smaller classes, so I went there first.
Mount Royal College was an OK place. Not up to the educational standards I had come to expect at George Brown College, but certainly amusing at times. I met a few good friends, annoyed a few instructors and ended up getting a good summer job in the College's Technical Services department.
After getting on the Mount Royal Dean's List all four semesters and the President's Honor Roll both years, I moved on to the University of Calgary to complete my Comp Sci BSc. It should have taken me two years, but because I took some of the tougher courses and one of my Mount Royal courses wasn't good for transfer credit, I ended up spending two and a half years at U of C.
In retrospect coming to Calgary for my education wasn't an optimal solution. U of C's program was not up to my expectations, and it's not known for its CS graduates.
Calgary is a lovely city and I really like it, but the people leave a lot to be desired. There are few true professionals in Calgary. Far more frequently than in other cities we encountered people who didn't even seem to know what it means to be professional. Users.
Back to the story. After finishing my BSc with first-class honors, I took some time off to unwind before facing the stress of a job search. I then got lucky and landed a programming job at Codefast.com based solely on my grades. It was a great place to work. It had all the important perks: flexible hours and casual dress.
My next big step was to go to get my MSc in Comp Sci. I considered trying for a PhD, but there was too much public speaking involved. I hate making speeches. The plan was to get satisfied with my education, then enter the workforce until financially solvent, then consider starting my own company.
I was wooed by some U of C professors, but although they're great people working on interesting things, I was tired of that place. I applied to Waterloo and was accepted, but I was also accepted at Simon Fraser. After mulling over the faculty available at the two institutions and my feelings about the locations, I decided to attend SFU. I wanted to live on the coast for a while. I was planning to go to Simon Fraser in the fall of 1999, but I didn't have enough money. I ended up going in the fall of 2000 instead.
After my first year at Simon Fraser, my prof suggested I go on internship for a semester. I ended up working at Radical Entertainment for four months. The work turned out to be largely irrelevant to my thesis, but it was interesting and helped me gain some much-needed perspective (and much-needed money). It was an interesting time to work at Radical since they were celebrating their 10th year in business, they had just moved into new offices and were still settling in, and the company was growing fast. They passed the 200-employee mark when I was there, and released Simpsons Road Rage and Dark Summit.
After leaving Radical I spent a semester and a half casting around for a thesis topic. It was much more difficult to find one than I expected. One day in the Summer of 2002, my supervisor passed me a paper on fog and smoke simulation. It looked pretty interesting to me in that it could be applied to produce improved special effects for games, and my prof saw at least one possible avenue along which to extend it, so I spent the next year tackling it.
My thesis was on trying to do physically accurate fluid flow simulation in Fourier space, for the purpose of producing an improved fog or smoke simulation for use in video games. It proved to be impractical, but that in itself was new information and was the content of my thesis report.
I successfully defended my thesis in August 2003. Then I took a couple of weeks off before stepping up my job search efforts. In mid-December 2003 I started work as a software engineer at Electronic Arts Canada. This was pretty much the ideal hire for me - the culmination of my youthful goals and my long educational journey. Now I can spend some time reflecting on where I've been and where I'm going next.
That about wraps it up for the chronological storyline. I'm not done talking about myself though. There's still a few miscellaneous tidbits to cover.
I've seen a lot of Canada, and I'd have to say that my favorite places (aside from touristy places like Drumheller and Long Beach) are Calgary and Toronto. Calgary because it's a lovely city (though I could do without most of the people), and Toronto because it's big and chock-full of interesting things to do and the people are generally nicer.
I haven't seen much of what's outside Canada. I've been to Buffalo NY for a day, Niagara Falls a couple of times, and Washington State for about five minutes because of a wrong turn. That's the extent of my adventures in other countries. I would like to take a world tour someday.
I spend my free time coding (except when I have no free time), playing games, watching anime or browsing online. I also engage in photography as a hobby.
My major motivation in life is computer gaming. I was instantly hooked from the day I played my first arcade game when I was about 7 years old, and I've been an avid and constant gamer since then. The first game I can remember playing was City Connection at the K-Mart store that used to be in Forest Lawn in Calgary. I think it was the music and fluid motion that hooked me.
I took up programming and then electronics as hobbies because I saw that they were the required skills for game production. I wanted to make arcade games when I grew up. I still do, though I've diversified to include computer and console games too.
I learned to write games for my VIC-20 in BASIC, but at first I mainly followed the electronics path because I felt superior hardware was the key to making really great games, which is true. However, by the time I finished my electronics courses the bleeding edge of game hardware technology had surpassed my dreams and I decided it would be too much work for me to improve on existing game electronics. Besides, the technology had reached a stage where I could do any game I wanted in software. So I looked into computer graphics courses.
I grew frustrated at the options in graphics courses, and I realized that the real work was in the program and not the graphics. Thus I ended up in Comp Sci. I didn't learn how to write games in Comp Sci - I'd already taught myself that and I still am. What I got from Comp Sci is high-level design techniques, group project experience, and a piece of paper saying I know my stuff. I was pretty disappointed with the content of the courses, though. In the four and a half years of undergrad Comp Sci I've taken, the useful stuff I've learned could easily be covered in one semester.
Fortunately, grad school at SFU was another story. Most of the courses I took held some actual interest for me, and one was actually challenging.
That's about all I have to say that isn't present somewhere else in my web site. Thanks for reading this. Now go read the rest.
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Copyright (c),© 2003 by
Soleil Lapierre.
Last updated September 21, 2003.