A Note About Being A Woman

My Life In Technology

My autobiography covers my experience with technology, with using technology and how technology has technology had affected my life. It also covers what inspired me to become an 3D modeler and animator.

Radar and Air traffic control

My earliest memory of technology was Radar and Air traffic control equipment. My father was an air traffic controller at a local airport and then at an international airport. Being that he was a single father, it was not unusual for him to take my brother and I on his night shifts, because we did not have a babysitter and my older sister had to work.

Pong
Another early memory was playing pong. It was ancient even by the time I was playing it. My parents bought it when my sisters were little, before I was born. By the time I was old enough to play it, the youngest of my older sister was eighteen (I was seven).

Simon Game

By the time I was seven years old, my father and my teachers began to notice that I had learning problems. After visiting with some specialists, they found that I had problems with eye hand coordin

ation. They recommended a Simon game as part of the treatment to help me learn to cross my hands across my body and to focus on the flashing lights. It played like the game Simon Says, but using the large, lighted buttons and sounds instead of body language. The colored button

s would flash and play sounds in a seq

uence and player would repeat the sequence. If the player got the sequence wrong the game would emit a low horn sound and then repeat the same sequence. If the player got the sequence right, the game would give a more complicated sequence. When completed a round, the emitted a jumble of sounds and lights and then started a more complicated round.

Odyssey game system

When I was about eight years old, my father and teachers discovered after extensive testing that I was learning disabled. My father (an avid Radio Shack shopper) found an

educational game console called Odyssey. I spent many hours playing the educational spelling game version of Centipede on the system. The difference between this console and an Atari console was that the Odyssey "talked" (but not correctly) and had a full keyboard, whereas the Atari system just used joysticks. When ever I would spell a word or do a math problem correctly, the system would say, "you are connect (the system mispronounced the word correct)!"

Pixar's first 3D animation at the IMAX Theater in Denver Co.

I would frequently visit my mother on the weekends. She tried to make each visit memorable by taking my brother and I to different attractions around the area, such as the Colorado Museum of Natural History, where the IMAX Theater is located. We would normally sit bored out of our minds through documentaries on beavers or migrating salmon. But one particular time, there was a double feature on new forms of animation and Hawaii. My mother of course wanted to see the feature on Hawaii. But when I saw the iconic lamps of what was to be Pixar Animation Studios, I was astounded. This was no Mighty Mouse or Popeye the Sailor man cartoon, The images were so realistic, but had human like personalities. My eight, year old mind was sent off wheeling. I knew that I wanted to make "cartoons" like that. But I had a long road to go down to get there.

Around about this same time, a movie came out that called the Last Starfighter. The story was about a young man, who is the local handy man and who did not know what he wanted to do with his life, until he wins an Atari arcade game, called Starfighter. He is then whisked off to defend the universe as the Last Starfighter. My family lived in the Caribbean at the time the movie was released, we had to drive a couple hours though the rainforest to get to the theater to see it, but it was worth it my young mind. Later my, brother found the arcade game a Pizza Hut in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My brothers and loved to play it, even though we never got whisked off to save the universe.

Tandy 2000 Computer

The first computer my family bought was a Tandy 2000 from again, Radio Shack. My dad had got it for homework but we mostly played Lode Runner and Kings Quest on it.

My family had the computer until one day we turned it on and it blew sparks out the back.

Kings Quest

My family bought the game Kings Quest not long after buying the computer. The graphics in the game were cutting edge, for the time. We also had an early version of paint. I would use to try to reproduce the King’s Quest graphics. We also had an educational game where I first learned a little about animating graphics.

Yeah! Check out dem grafixs! Look how far we have come

About the same time that my family bought our first computer, we bought our first robot. Sounds cheesy, I know, but we did, again from Radio Shack. The robot was called Robie Sr. and had several useful features. The robot had clamps for hands, carried a tray, could driven by remote control or programmed, had an alarm clock for waking up it owners or completing tasks, a computerized voice and a recorder, head lights for the dark and an intercom for calling everyone to dinner.

Nintendo

When I was about twelve years old, my mother bought my brother and I a Nintendo 64 game system for Christmas. We hooked the system up to the TV in my room and spent most of the day playing. But the next morning, I awoke to find my brother and step-brothers bouncing up and down on the end of my bed, playing the game. I was irritated, they outnumbered me and three of them were bigger than me. I learned that video games could addictive, because they could not even wait for me to get up in the morning.

Goonies game

Earlier in the same year, the movie “Goonies”, by Steven Spielberg came out. I and my friends loved the movie and would frequently act out scenes from the movie. I thought that it would be fun to have an adventure and find a lost pirate treasure, and the Nintendo gave me a chance in way to do that with the game “Goonies”. I would spend hours climbing ladders, looking for hidden passage ways and dodging the Fertelli brothers to defeat the game.

Sega

When I was a sophomore in high school, my youngest brother received a Sega Saturn. The most popular of the games were Spider Man and X-Men vs. Magneto and Sonic the Hedge Hog.

On a bad note

My junior year of high school, my father insisted that I take typing as an elective instead of drama. I had already take the prerequisite for the drama class and I had never really typed before, and I was pretty positive that I would hate it, and I did. I was more interested at this time in my life in throwing shot put and having fun. I was certainly not interested in technology, it was nothing more than annoyance to me, I mean, I had a cell phone that weighed 10lbs and need a car battery to make one call (I am now a cell phone surfer, text messaging junkie, with a Smartphone with a full keyboard). I struggled in class and my dad insisted that spend an hour each day typing “the little red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog” in the backroom of the house on the family computer. But it was not until my instructor sent a note home to my father saying that I was the worst typist he had ever seen and he felt that it would be better if I picked another elective, that I was allowed to join the drama class.

Work

After high school, it became pretty clear the college was out of the question, but I tried anyway. I had hoped to go to BYU, but one of my teachers did not feel that I would be able to handle being in large classes because of a learning disability. But I eventually had to get a job running copiers and a cash register. I made about $80 a paycheck. After a year, I was able to a two year college in Idaho for about six months. But money soon ran out and I had to move to New Mexico and lock myself behind a register again. I tried to find other jobs without much success. My father was one of those guys who believed that education came through the “school of hard knocks” and pushed me to get “that job with benefits”, but in today’s day and age, it is almost impossible to get without a college education. After being taken advantage of by several employers, I had to come to the realization that I was not going to make it anywhere without a degree and I was going to have to help my father understand. So I enrolled in Dona Ana Community College, while working another “register” job. It was not until a week before my father passed away. I was hired as the Career Resource Center Facilitator at Onate High School, where I was put in charge of a lab of computers and making sure that every student in the school was prepared for what was to come after high school.

This is also me the opportunity to produce my first 3D animated commercial for the Career Resource Center. The commercial was aired during the weekly school news broadcast and it grabbed the attention of the student, even with it’s bad timing. I graduated from Dona Ana Branch Community College in May of 2005 with an associate's degree in Digital Graphics and Technology. But, to my dismay, no one would hire me with only a two year degree. :(

Not long after graduation, I was invited to a meeting at NMSU about a new degree program, called Creative Media. I was interested, but that meant for schooling. I had applied for several animation jobs, but I was not considered for them because they required a bachlor’s degree and at least one year of experience. I had a degree, but I was still up a creek without a paddle. But even so, I still was not sure I wanted to go back to school, until Mark Medoff (a playwright and famous screenwriter of Children of a Lesser God) handed a yellow post it not to me. The note simply told who I needed to talk to.