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About Minh

Minh’s Notes › About › About Minh

I’m Minh Nguyễn. I live in Loveland, Ohio, and I attend school at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. I occupy my leasure time by programming; blogging; maintaining my website; contributing to Wikipedia, Mozilla, and Adobe Atmosphere; sketching; IMing; and playing the piano. You’re about to find out more than you ever thought you wanted to know about me:

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History

I was born in Humana Hospital of New Orleans (now Lakeland Medical Center) on Monday, March 9th, 1987, which means I’m 17 years ( days) old. Soon after I was born, my family moved to Arlington, Texas; then to Reading, Ohio shortly thereafter; then to Montgomery; and then to Blue Ash; before finally moving to Loveland, Ohio.

I live in a two-story house in a nice neighborhood in Loveland. But that’s all I’m going to tell you about my residence. Of course, you can always use one of those people databases. (sigh)

(For the less sneaky, you can GeoURL this website to find out the geological coordinates of my computer and those websites lucky enough to be situated near it.)

Heritage

As you can probably maybe deduce from my picture, the one that I slapped all over the place, I’m Vietnamese-American. You see, years ago, both my parents’ families imigrated to the US from Vietnam. Because of our Vietnamese heritage, they gave me a Vietnamese name.

Name

Undoubtedly, you’ve seen my full name and made a face like this: %^\. 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):

Mm iē nhng   Xs uw âə nn   Ngng uw yē ễĭ nn

(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.)

It’s a lot easier on you if you know Portuguese or Spanish.

School

I currently attend St. Xavier High School. I am in my junior year right now with a cumulative GPA of 93.63 (my school doesn’t use the four-point scale).

This school year, I’m taking:

Since freshmen year, I have participated in the St. X Quiz Team, a member of the GCAL. You can keep track of the team’s progress here.

Before coming to St. X, I attended a few years of preschool at the JW Peck Federal Building, Kindergarten at KinderCare in Loveland, First Grade at Lloyd Mann Primary (now LECC or Loveland Primary, depending on how you look at it), and the rest of elementary school at St. Columban. Personally, I think St. Columban prepared me well for St. X, but others might disagree, and the school always seemed to be degrading year by year, worsening once I left the school. But at least they have SmartBoards now. :^)

Spare Time

I’m a bit… different than most others when it comes to the radio. I can listen to almost whatever comes onto the radio (except for Heavy Metal and Country), but I prefer Classical (when I’m trying to go to sleep) and Oldies (when I’m in the car). (Yes, you can say I’m stuck in the past. :^)) I used to be okay with Country, but, thanks to Chris, I’m just sick of it now.

I do watch TV. No, I don’t have cable, satellite, or HDTV. (Yes, yes, I’m just so deprived. rolls eyes) Actually, I get many channels, since we live between Cincinnati and Dayton, meaning that we get channels from Cincinnati (5, 9, 12, 39, 48, 64), Dayton (2, 7, 16, 22, 26, 45), Oxford (14), Richmond (43), Norwood (25), Covington (54), Newport (19), and even Louisville (11) sometimes. Beat that, Time Warner! Okay, maybe not…

Now, that’s not to say that there’s always something good to watch, but it’s plenty enough for me. Besides, I watch mostly news shows and PBS anyways.

But I don’t spend very much of my free time with just entertainment. I have hobbies, you know, such as playing the piano and sketching.

I started playing piano very young, when I first became aware that there was an electric organ in the living room. By the time I was eight or so, my father had given that torn up organ to a friend, had bought a new Baldwin piano, and had signed me up for piano lessons. I studied piano for 2 ½ years, but by the Fifth Grade, homework made regular practice almost impossible. I had to drop something — and dropping school wasn’t an option at that age (not that I would drop out).

I like to sketch street scenes, buildings, and trees. Most of my sketches come from my imaginary city Avanue (that’s not a typo, but it is based on the type of street). And I’m horrible sketching people, unless they’re really, really small ones in my streetscapes.

And then, there’s the computer…

Computers

I used to say that working with computers is a hobby of mine, but it’s really more of a obsession–turned–course of study.

My family’s had several computers so far:

For web browsing, I typically use Mozilla Firefox 0.8 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8) and Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows 6.0.2800.1106IS (only when necessary).

For e-mail, I use Netscape Webmail, on whichever browser I’m using at the time, and Mozilla Thunderbird. For web development, I use Allaire HomeSite 4.01.

I use my free copy of Adobe Atmosphere 1.0 (which I got for beta-testing the product) for VR web development. I once created an Atmosphere world, but it has since fallen into disrepair, and hasn’t been updated since the days of beta Build 67. You can still view it here, if you like. (You’ll of course need to download the Atmosphere Player plugin to view it.)

For IM, I typically use one of a few Jabber clients – JabberIM, neos mt, RhymBox, and Jabberzilla (which I’m helping to create). I usually use a Jabber account hosted at myJabber.

As Cincinnatians, my family has to choose between three services for high-speed Internet access. We chose to use Fuse with ZoomTown, rather than RoadRunner or Cinergy’s soon-to-debut service, because we’ve already had Fuse for several years, we don’t have cable, and we consider ZoomTown to be more secure.

Games

I do play video games – I play Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Kart: Double Dash, or Super Mario Brothers – only when my brother makes me. But I don’t play computer games (although I do use Atmosphere). You could, again, say I’m deprived. rolls eyes

I also play several board games, such as Othello (aka Reversi) and Mancala (the Kancala variety), and Uno, when my brother makes me play it.

Religion

I’m Roman Catholic, and I attend St. Columban Parish regularly. On occasion, however, my family attends Mass at Our Lady of Lavang (Nhà Thờ Đức Mẹ La Vang), a Catholic Vietnamese church, one of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Catholic communities.

Language

I know English fluently, and I understand Vietnamese fluently (I’m learning to also speak and write it fluently as well). I also take Spanish Ⅲ at school. And since I know English and much of Spanish, I essentially know Interlingua.

I’m very interested in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which I consider far superior to the phonetic system used in American dictionaries today. I’m also slightly interested in Shavian.

Politics

I don’t really affiliate myself with any party, but I tend to lean towards liberal parties, such as the Democrats or Greens.

In the 2000 Presidential Election, I would’ve liked the moderate John McCain to have received the Republican nomination, but since he didn’t, I voted for Ralph Nader in the Kid’s Vote.

Looks like I’ve got enough in here to write an autobiography, but I’ll save that for later.

By Minh Nguyễn.
Friday, March 12th, 2004
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