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Born and raised in Silicon Valley. I'm in high tech, but my passion is soccer.
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Activity Summary
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Reviews Written: 17
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Member Visits: 580
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Total Visits: 33,875
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About dmsilva1
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I graduated from Cal in '92 with a degree in Psychology and quickly came to the realization that I did not want to pursue my original goal of a Doctorate. While I no longer found being a psychologist as a passionate dream, I did still want to work with people. Unfortunately, 1992 was the worst job market in 20 years and my options were poor out of the gate. After a brief stint as a manager with Agency Rent-a-car, I knew I needed a career change. So what next? Computers!
I launched my computer career with the goal to move from learning about the products, to helping others with the products, to teaching others about a product, and finally to help design products that better suit the consumer. I am happy to say I'm doing well.
I have been working within the computer multimedia industry since 2D acceleration was king, video scaling and overlay surfaces were unknown features, and MCI was the multimedia interface of choice.
I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1992 and went into corporate sales in San Jose, supplying cutting edge PC solutions to Silicon Valley's leading high technology companies. Although he had success in sales, he found his real talent was finding solutions to his customer's technical problems.
I moved on to technical support in 1994 to help support Computer Based Training systems, and cutting edge multimedia products- among them one of the first consumer based 3D graphics solutions. I worked within the organization supporting and evangelizing the new technology through gamer conventions and contributions to various fan based websites.
Later I moved on to OEM sales group at Diamond. At that time one of the biggest obstacles to winning the OEM business in 1998 was DVD support. DVD was still a new technology and I was assigned to help investigate the potential issues. Throughout 1997-1999 DVD had been a developing technology with constant compatibility and performance issues. The delays in identifying and offering a fully working solution cost many opportunities to be lost to the competition.
Well this opened a new chapter of my career, when I was recruited into a software company that specialized in a DVD player for the PC. I have since moved on and I am currently in Product Marketing at a DVD authoring company.
I just covered a lot of territory (and it was rough territory at that- believe me, I went through it!), but that is the jist of who I am career wise.
Now on to the physical stuff. I'm 5'9" with brown hair and eyes. I played soccer from the tender age of 6 to 15, and then occasionally in college, and have come back to it now as an adult.
In my youth I usually played middle half back and was a top scorer, with many hat tricks throughout the years. I had to stop when I became sick with ITP for an extended period.After a few years I was better and joined wresting my junior year.
I was totally out of shape starting off weighing about 195 pounds and not even being able to bench press 135 pounds, or even do 20 pushups (even if given a lot of credit for half push ups.) Well my junior year I lost 35 pounds and finished the year benching 225 pounds. My senior year I was still addicted to losing weight and finally stopped at the 138 weight class. Technically this was too low for me (I was loosing muscle mass and my doctor warned me that I was under 15% body fat), but the wrestlers at 155 and 148 weight classes were too bloody good, and I wanted to compete. I did what I could and finished out pretty good. I was in great shape (easily doing 50 push ups) and my self image had much improved.
College, marriage, and kids have took their toll brought me up to all time high of 235 pounds; however, I two years ago I went on Atkins, and then back to the soccer field and I'm back well below 200lbs now.
A lot of people say it is too hard to keep in shape as you get older. Well, that might be so, but if I had recess every hour, and soccer, baseball, or wrestling practice in the afternoons I think I could keep in shape. Life is about work, the more you do the more you get back.
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