Pandapolis: About Us

> > about

Simply put, Pandapolis is my personal website and blog. Its purpose is to share with friends and family, to market my job talents to potential employers, and to ward off potential squatters to the Pandapolis name (particularly zoos with giant pandas, toy companies that make stuffed pandas and otherwise harmless fanatics of the Panda Express restaurant chain).

> > beginnings

1999 - When dinosaurs ruled the earth, 56K dial-up was the zenith of technological evolution, and people still bought CD's at confiscatory prices from brick-and-mortar music stores, I started an online jukebox channel on the Imagine Radio website called Radio Free Rich, with a strange mix of smooth jazz and modern rock. (No wonder nobody listened to it.) It was later renamed The Kickback Cafe.
2000 - I created an companion website around the jukebox station in 2000, also named The Kickback Cafe. The host music site was renamed Radio SonicNet.
2002 - Radio SonicNet shut down, and The Kickback Cafe jukebox station with it. The website kept the name.
2006 - The Kickback Cafe is given a new look and a new name, Pandapolis, to avoid confusion with other personal sites of the same name with highly questionable content.
2008 - Pandapolis' website coding is converted from HTML to XHTML, which I learned in 2007 from a really cool book I checked out from the library on the subject.
2009 - Pandapolis gets another makeover, adding a contact form, links to my profile pages at other social networking sites, embedded YouTube and Tangle.com videos, a new home for my blog at Blogger, and absolutely nothing about its 10th anniversary this year. :)

> > today

2009 marks ten years since I established my presence on the internet with Radio Free Rich, later The Kickback Cafe and now Pandapolis. Since then I have learned web design skills such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, podcast feeds, and web page editors such as Microsoft FrontPage and NoteTab Light, as well as the web features of Microsoft Word, Publisher and OpenOffice.org. Pandapolis is my online sandbox and laboratory for playing with and testing out new web skills.

I am a fan of the Atari 2600 classic video game console and the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer family, learning about and creating programs for the MC-10. I also contribute to selected Wikipedia articles that I have knowledge of, particularly Los Angeles area radio stations. But given the nature of that beast, whatever I may have added to any article may have been taken down 86 seconds later.

> > stats

When was I born? March 5, 1970. Do the math.

Where was I born? At Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in East L.A. You may now sing Cheech and Chong's parody song "Born in East L.A.", because that's exactly where I was born.

Where do I live? West Covina, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Nicknamed "The Diamond of the San Gabriel Valley" or simply "Dub C", West Covina is the home of a Big League Dreams baseball park, two Westfield shopping malls (West Covina and Eastland), and one of the largest Filipino communities outside of the Phillipines. In the summer of 2009, Best Buy will open a new store at Westfield West Covina, on the site of a former Macy's. It will be one of the first Best Buys I'm aware of to anchor a traditional indoor mall.

Are you the head coach of the University of Michigan football team? Thankfully no, especially after their first season under my namesake.

Did you go to college? Yes, but not in Michigan. Too cold in winter. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communications with an empasis in Film and Television Production from Chapman University in sunny, drought-stricken California.

Why did you move your blog to Blogger? I used to have an account with WordPress via Yahoo! Web Hosting, and it never had any support or updates by either company. I already had a Google account through YouTube, so I used it to set up a Blogger account and moved The Pandapolis Blog there. The old sucky blog was decommissioned and laid to rest at that great online cemetery, the Internet Archive, on April 28.

Why so many profiles instead of just one or two? Each one is for a specific purpose. My YouTube channel is the home of my original animations, slideshows and videos because of its easy upload and sharing. My LinkedIn account is for job networking, and my Tangle.com account is for networking with fellow Christians.

What's your favorite music? I've never been a fan of one particular style. I grew up watching "Soul Train", "American Bandstand" and "The Lawrence Welk Show" with my parents on Saturdays, listening to "The Dr. Demento Show" in my teens and college years, and appreciating big band music from KGRB-AM, a small radio station in West Covina whose transmitter was a few miles from where I grew up. Currently I like smooth jazz, classical, contemporary Christian, big bands and Broadway show tunes. I've also been a lifelong fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic.

What else do you like? As strange as it sounds, I also like archived broadcasts on YouTube of old TV station sign-offs and sign-ons, which I parody in my animated movie "Late Night TV" and slideshow movie "Indian Head Test Pattern Simulator". And for all you normies, I also like hiking, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Los Angeles Angels, Anaheim Ducks, and comtemplating how there is no escape on this planet from the BBC, no matter how hard you try. The U.S. version of its "Dancing with the Stars" is the top-rated show on ABC, its World Service is on many public radio stations and, most shockingly, even I got into the act with my animated movie "Two Nonfat Ladies". Accept it, my dear children; Auntie is everywhere!

Can you lend me 20 bucks? Sorry, I can't. Ever since the bad PR over Bambi's mother being shot the National Park Service is understandably very leery about visitors getting in close contact with the deer population, let alone renting out twenty of them.