Two Quotes
Who am I?
I was born, then moved 22 times by the time I was 22. My current state
of residence is Arizona. I lived in Tucson for 10 years where I
attended The University of Arizona twice. The first time, I was fresh
out of high-school majoring in Management Information Systems. I
didn't even know what that was at the time. Two years into course work
and I dropped out to pursue things that I enjoyed, airbrushing and
billiards.
I've airbrushed consistently for 12 years, all the while playing pool 40 hours a week. Needless to say, this didn't leave much time to study in school. I worked with a local gift shop at the Tucson mall doing consignment airbrushing, painted cars for DetailzUnlimited, painted several large scale murals, and wrote airbrush how-to articles for Airbrush Technique Magazine. Something was missing during those days, financial security.
In 2004, I met Mark Fredrickson (illustration airbrush artist) through
his brother James. I actually worked for James's company, MixAudio,
out of Mark's house. During this time, I got to see Mark's original
airbrush works, his studio, and his current projects prior to them
hitting the presses. During the MixAudio days, Mark liked to surf the
web. He would occasionally share some of his interesting finds. The
most notable was a computational linguist who designed a web spider to
seek the answer to questions. Questions such as, "When will the price
of gold go up?" His bot would scour the internet analyzing how people
talk about gold and return an answer. Before I moved on from this time
in my life, Mark gave me one of his originals paintings, all his
airbrushes, and quite possibly the last remaining supply of CS-10
illustration paper.
July of 2005 was the month I decided to go back to college. August
21st was the first day of classes. My timing only gave me a month to
register for classes. Just before the semester began, I exhausted
available classes to register for and still needed one more class.
Fortunately, my mother found one, Introduction to Linguistics (LING
201). I wasn't thrilled after hearing about that web spider from Mark.
It sounded difficult and only for brilliant minds. Turned out I have a
brilliant mind and received 699 points out of 700 in the class. In
2007, I graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and began attending
graduate school for a M.S. in Human Language Technologies and a Ph.D.
in Linguistics, majoring in Computational Linguistics and minoring in
Syntax.
Part of the requirements for the Master's degree was to complete an internship and write a prelim based on your work there. I did my internship in the simulation industry, working on building synthetic voices in a variety of languages using the HTS engine, which is the synthesis side of the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). At the time, there wasn't any tutorial style documentation like there is today, so the task was to figure out the process and document it. One long manual and two months later completed my task to provide documentation the procedure to build context dependent pentaphone voice models. They offered me a job at a "Why go back to school!" salary, but I went back to school anyway.
I finished my M.S. in Human Language Technologies and opted out of
completing the Ph.D. to return to work in the simulation industry here in Phoenix Arizona. Turns out applying that which I've learned in school makes me very happy. I'm still there today and try to keep learning new things. At home I've
worked on micro-controller programming, a home dialog system, search
history software development, network programming, GUI programming,
Direct3D programming, built a new airbrush studio, took up Krav
Maga for fitness, and returned to nature with some camping and hiking.
If you have ever been to airbrushexcellence.com before, I'm the same person, but the site is new. Through the misfortune of me not backing up my site and my hosting provider upgrading me to a new server, I lost my database this site was generated from. I have put off the rebuild of this site for two years. Now marks the day I'm ready to launch a new version. Including my new domain name, MasterDain.com. I believe it's very fitting... Good thing I didn't finish the Ph.D. because then it would have been DoctorDain.com.
Poke around my new site. I'm trying to collect information that I've found useful in my pursuit of expanding my mind and fulfilling my creative desires. I hope you will be inspired to create and participate in sharing your creativity.
Dainon Woudstra
the Hobbyist
2011-01-06 - Contact Me