Some guys are too much...

Peter Shih is a very good friend of mine. He's originally from Taiwan but has been in USA since the age of 6. Met him in the Algorithms class...one helluva brain this guy has! Give him any problem anywere and he'll come up with at least 2 different solutions to the problem.

No wonder then, that he is the Chief Strategist for the UMR Solar Car Team which placed 4th recently in the recently held solar car race. He led from the front in the $200,000 project to build the solar car...designing power optimization algorithms, weather prediction stuff, et all. The guy spent days and nights holed out in the team garage chipping away at the computer, making the car better. The guy has no qualms about learning stuff which are in no way related to Electrical Engineering (he'a an M.S. student in EE) so long as it makes the car run better.

He loves Indian "curry"...well for him everything is curry of some form or the other :D The last time I went to his place we had excellent pasta! And played on his XBox for hours :)

He'll be back on monday from the race. Will call him over for some spicy rasam!


That's John Chaloupek....my team leader at CTEL. Well, team leader less and friend more. He's the kinda guy they tell you about on TV when talking about the computer revolution. Long hair (usually in a pony tail), long goatee and always wears black !! Black shirt, black trousers, socks, shoes, hat, bag....heck even his umbrella is black :D

Is one of the best programmers I've seen and an extreme caffeine addict. In fact he was the main force behind getting a coffee machine up and running in CTEL. Also works for Dr. T, and has been in the university for 2.5 years now and going strong towards completing 3. Poor John....gets screwed royally by Dr. T in his research.

All that apart, the guy has an amazing sense of humor and most often than not our weekly project meetings turn into a laughing frenzy! Met him in the algorithms class as well and he was usually the one sitting with a blank look on his face just like me :D Converted any and all of Peter's algorithms into C++ just for the heck of it. Is originally from Czechoslovakia but he too moved here at the age of 6.

Hope he gets started on his thesis soon...