About Minh
December 19, 2007
I’m Minh Nguyễn of Loveland, Ohio, United States, North America, Earth, Solar System, Local Fluff, Local Bubble, Orion Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Milky Way Subgroup, Local Group, Canes Venatici cloud, Virgo Supercluster, Local Filament, Universe. You get the idea.
I’m the first son of two Vietnamese immigrants; I was born March 1987 in New Orleans East, and since then I’ve lived in Arlington, Texas; Reading, Ohio; Montgomery, Ohio; Blue Ash, Ohio; and finally Loveland, where I graduated from St. Columban School in 2001. (I’m Roman Catholic, if you haven’t figured that out by now.)
I graduated from St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati as a member of the Class of 2005, though I’m still involved with the school, mainly through running Planet Xavier, a web-based aggregator of over 300 blogs by St. X students, teachers, and alumni. I started the service in December 2004 after seeing how St. X were all in tiny little islands of emotistic thought, linked here and there by Xanga’s very useless subscriptions feature. Now everyone’s happily together. I think.
So that’s my past in a rather textual nutshell. Boring, isn’t it? You’d probably be more interested in what I’m doing now. Obviously I blog, first of all – otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. I typically blog about technology, politics, school, and the nitty-gritty details of my personal life – though you won’t find out what my cat had for breakfast last Friday, because I don’t have a cat. No one-paragraph description of my blog would really do it justice, since it’s really just a big conglomeration of things that interest me. So go ahead and gander at the front page and the archives (which stretch back to March 2002); I think that’d give you a better idea whether you’d like my writing or not. Better yet, read Gems, a collection of my finest writing at this blog.
I’m also a regular contributor to Wikipedia – that wonderful online encyclopedia that admits you actually know something – and its sister projects (see my userpage), though I spend most of my time helping out with the Vietnamese-language Wikipedia, which I’m one of the bureaucrats (super-administrators) for. Wiki’ing is hard work, especially when you’re one of the prominent contributors. What keeps me going is the pleasure in knowing that much of what we’re writing and translating covers topics that’ve never been written in Vietnamese (or in any language) before. Or if they have been, we’re making them much more accessible.
In my free time – if that’s even a possibility these days – I also maintain websites for my parish back home, St. Columban, and for my dorm. Which reminds me…
On top of that potpourri, I’m an undergraduate student at the Leland Stanford Junior University. (That’s Stanford, that place all the way out in California, for all the Ohioans reading this.) So yes, I attend classes, do homework, write papers and computer programs (since I’m considering a major in CS), and take midterms. Oh, midterms… I’m on the Quiz Bowl team and attend SVSA meetings occasionally, and I’m still marveling at the college experience. That’s a fact that won’t change for a long time: this is such an amazing place.
About Minh’s name
So undoubtedly, you’ve seen my full name and asked yourself “$(*$@#(%*$@#*????!!!�?” (Because you really like saying the names of punctuation marks.) For the record, this roughly is how you pronounce my full name, using the American dictionary phonetic system (which hardly covers any language other than English):
Nguyễn Xuân Minh
(You need to use a browser that supports ruby text. Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows is one of them. If you’re using Mozilla or a browser based on it, you’ll need to install the XHTML Ruby Support extension by Piro.)
And yes, the family name comes first, since I have a Vietnamese name.
How to contact Minh
Send your comments, questions, compliments, flames, and spam to me via e-mail or Jabber.
