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How are you actually? What is a typical Gary Kato day in 2006?

I am doing fine these days. I am working for a nice small company called CrystalMedia Technology in Sunnyvale, CA. I write software modules for digital TV chipsets. I've been there for about a year and a half. The company is owned by a large Taiwanese company called MediaTek (they make the chipsets). The great thing about this is that CrystalMedia has a small feel without the money worries of typical small companies.

I don't keep to a rigid schedule, which took my boss some while to get used to. It was a source of friction in the early days but he trusts me at this point, for which I am honored. A typical day is I wake up, check email, go to work, come home, check email, read or play games or watch DVDs, sleep. Probably the only thing that varies is the time all that happens. I may wake up at 5AM or 5PM. Even I don't know.

Please tell me something about your educational-background, your profession or programming-skills which guided the way to Imagic.

When I was in Junior College, I was a Chemistry major. I walked into a Physics class one day and the teacher was talking about some stuff and on the board were strange incantations like "100 FOR I=1 TO 10". We were studying harmonic motion and she wanted us to write programs to display on a Tektronix graphics terminal. Well, I was hooked after that. Since the graphics library for BASIC didn't work quite right, most people stopped programming. Another fellow and I taught ourselves Fortran IV since that was what the graphics library was for. By the way, this first computer was a DEC PDP-10.

From there, I went to UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, the University and I did not seem to have the same priorities. I wanted to learn programming and they wanted me to learn all this other stuff. I stuck it out for a while, but after one class where a professor made continual mistakes explaining something to us then saying "Well, it's all in the book" before he left the classroom, I was angry. I was paying for this education? But then those words came back to me like a gift. "It's all in the book." So, I bought the textbooks for the courses I wanted to take, then left the University.



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