While in Massachusetts, I, along with my dad and older brother, would go on hikes in the forest that began right at the end of our street.  I would often notice the big holes and ditches that were created due to erosion.  In Belgium, the topography is fairly dominant in forestation, and we had several forests that we would go on hikes in, and I would notice similar holes and ditches, the only difference is that the ones in Belgium were created by bombs in world war II.  At any rate, I began to enjoy the outdoors, and the peace and tranquility that accompanied it.  In scouts, camping trips were a necessity, and, being in Europe, I was able to go some pretty interesting places on those campouts, ranging from a field neighboring an air force hangar with planes flying up and down, to Germany's Black forest, to very near the battleground of the Battle of the Bulge, in Belgium.  In Belgium, I would go rock climbing fairly frequently, as large rock formations were abundant and accessible.  In France, that sport expanded to mountain climbing, as I learned the basics of ice climbing and glacier hiking.

My first real experience with spectator sports came when I moved to Utah in 1996, and started following the Utah Jazz.  Of course the years 97-98, the Jazz went to the NBA Finals, which was very exciting.  I would watch every Jazz game I could, and would attend several.  After the fall of the Jazz, however, I lost interest somewhat, and lost my ability to rattle off stats on every player on the Jazz and many other players and teams throughout the league.  Now, the only name I recognize is Greg Ostertag.

I began skiing while in Europe, and I got pretty good in 4th grade, while living in the Alps, because I went up to the ski resorts pretty much every week.  While in Germany, we would regularly road trip back to the Alps and go skiing for a weekend.  In Utah, I was in a school ski class, and in 7th grade, I was in the top level.  I could rip up a double black diamond mogul hill while keeping parallel form (that was actually the final test in that ski class), so the next year, I decided to expand myself, and try snowboarding.  Through 8th and 9th grade, I got pretty good.  I could carve both goofy and fakie, hit the park, the half pipe, and land moderate jumps.  10-12th grade, I went only a few times in the season, and got pretty rusty.  I'm still decent, but I've definitely lost my edge. Most recently, I've just gone skiing.  I'll pick up the snowboard again sometime.

In Belgium, far and away the most dominant and widely played sport is soccer.  Our house in Belgium had a large and rectangular backyard, and served very well as a soccer field.  Because of this, our yard hosted many neighborhood soccer games, attracting kids of all ages, from the elementary school kids, (which is what I was) or the older teenage kids.  We would play soccer pretty much very day over the summer, and although it was never an official structured league, it did hold it fair share of legitimacy.  In the United States, I played baseball for two years, and ran track for two years.  While I was never stellar at either of these sports, I enjoyed them for the most part, and they proved to be positive experiences.  I played baskeyball for a gym class at BYU, and also tired Tae kwon do (???) for a semester

I enjoy a good book.  I have had a fairly broad exposure to literature possibly for the reason that while growing up, our family always had time set apart at night to read.  The first major non-children's book that I read fully was "Sphere" by Michael Crichton, the summer between 6th and 7th grade.  I was very impressed by how engrossing a story can be.  While I find it difficult to get into a good book, it is usually worth the difficulty.  Perhaps the most addicting book I have read was Agatha Christie's "And then there were none", which was a bit of a struggle to get into, but I cleaned up the last half of the book in one night.  In 12th grade, I took AP English Literature, which forced me to read books and then dissect them for everything they are worth.  I suspect this put somewhat of a sour taste in my mouth, because it was reading for reasons other than enjoyment, which is not an invalid approach, especially in terms of historical contexts and social commentary, but as valid as those are, I struggle to find the personal appeal.

My introduction to real photography was in 11th grade, in my Multimedia class, where we had a photo unit.  I learned the process of developing and printing, F-stops and exposure, and many other elements involved.  As far as photography as an art form, I fully acknowledge the artistic skills and elements involved in photography, but when I see photography that is supposed to be stand-alone art, I often question its legitimacy as art, since I feel that photography and its artistic elements should serve as a form of documentation.  At any rate, I enjoy photography, and use it in many of my endeavors.

Everyone likes movies.  Me too.  But, with my background in video, I have somewhat of a different perspective, and have a more observant (but not critical) eye than most.  I took a film class in college, which helped me learn to pick out different elements and have a more strongly based perspective.  Some of my favorite movies are Back to the Future, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Lion King, The Matrix, and Jurassic Park.

I have enjoyed listening to music for a long time.  In our house in Belgium, we had a little boom box downstairs that with which I would often turn the radio on, and listen to local Belgian stations.  In Germany, I had a record player in my room, and would listen to old records, becoming familiar with artists such as Barry Manilow and Billy Joel.  Later I got into mp3s, and would thrive off of sites such as audiofind.com, where I could get songs, until of course, Napster came out.  My enthusiasm for music has grown, and I have attended many concerts, including They Might Be Giants, Barenaked Ladies, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, and John Williams.  Some of my favorite artists are Fastball, Hans Zimmer, U2, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

With my grandfather being a professional composer, musical composition was never something very withdrawn or distant to me.  At a fairly young age, I had started taken piano lessons, and using the very basic skill I had, put some notes together and called it an original composition.  Through the years, I have refined my musical skills, and in December of 1999, I wrote my first "real" song, meaning notated with some musical structure.  I have written several since, although more than writing songs, I often engage in piano jam sessions, where I develop various musical themes and how they might be able to be used and applied in a song.

Ever since watching the Back to the Future trilogy in second grade, I have been fascinated with the concept of time travel.  I have always enjoyed stories and other movies involving time travel, such as a Duck Tales movie involving going back in time and bring back a caveman, Lost in Space, Frequency, The Time Machine, Groundhog Day, and Contact. What I find even more interesting is the practical and scientific rationality and possibly of time travel.  I attended a lecture where Kip Thorne gave a coherant explanation of how the possibility of time travel is supported in Einstein's theory of relativity. Here is an explanation of how this works.  More recently theoritcal developments have been made about entagled photons, how they they may be able to warp time to communicate with each other.  More here.

Every kids one day wants to become an astronaut.  When this phase comes, a mandatory trip the library ensues, and many books about stars and planets are checked out.  When I began to read about space and the universe, I became fascinated.  I decided I didn't want to be an astronaut, but rather an astronomer.  I learned everything I could about space, and more specifically, our solar system.  In fact, in 5th Grade, I gave a comprehensive 2-day lecture on the solar system.  It went through each planet in depth, and gave accurate statistics on each.  Of course, a few years later, and a few years more mature, reality set in, and I decided I wasn't going to be an astronomer.  However, astronomy still remains a fascination with me.  Movies and books like Contact or Sphere always spark my interest, and my interest in physics, relativity and time travel often relate back to things involving the universe and astronomy.  I took an astronomy course in college which I found very engaging, but made any desire to become an astronomer I may have had vanish.

Physics is my favorite discipline within the realm of science.  My 11th grade honors physics class was probably the most intellectually stimulating class I have ever had.  Physics gave purpose and reality to mathematics for me.  I my favorite areas within physics are kinetic, quantum and astro.  I never got along too well with electric, though.  Still, I find physics incredibly interesting.

I have had a love-hate relationship with mathematics for a very long time.  I have always been very interested in how natural phenomena follow mathematically derived patterns, how so many others things in general are dictated by laws and principles of mathematics.  At times I love math, at times I hate it.  I like calculators, I don't like showing my work.  Perhaps I will never be fully reconciled with math, but I will always acknowledge it as a powerful, wonderful and beautiful thing.

One of my specialties in terms of the realm of science.  I had been meaning to write a scientific essay on the subject, but never got around to doing it until in 11th grade, my English teacher assigned a 10+ page research paper on the topic of our choice.  I chose to do it on higher dimensional science.  Here's the paper.  Although I was and still am very pleased with it, with 5 year retrospect, there are some minor misguided statements and logical fallacies.  Read it anyway, its not bad for a high schooler.

In 11th grade, Alex showed me how to write programs on the TI-86 calculator.  It helped me do stuff for solving math problems, converting radians into degrees, etc.  In chemistry the next year, I refined my skills, and made a very complete suite of programs that could solve almost every problem in basic chemistry you could imagine.  I started somewhat of an open source network in our class, with some other writers contributing code.  In college, I thought I would bring my programming to the next level, and learn java, so I took a class.  Unfortunately, it had reverse effects, and I now hate  java programming with somewhat of a passion.  Too bad.  I gave java another shot a few years later, and I did ok at it.  I still don't want to be a programmer, but at least my bitter hatred is gone.

A theory that has always fascinated me. Both special and general relativity are incredibly interesting. Special relativity can be explained with he following situation:
Think of a baseball pitcher throwing a baseball at 50 mi/hr from the pitchers mound. Then the ball crosses home plate at 50 mi/hr. Now suppose the pitcher stands in the back of a truck traveling at 50 mi/hr and throws the ball at 50 mi/hr. Then the ball will cross home plate at 100 mi/hr. This is just natural.
In the late 19th century, Michelson and Morley designed an experiment that replaced the baseball with light, and the truck was replaced by the entire Earth. But what they found was not the obvious solution. They found that light traveled at a constant speed. If the pitcher shines a flashlight at the batter, it goes at the same speed as if the pitcher shines the flashlight from the back of a moving truck. This is because when things go at the speed of light or near it, they warp time.
General relativity was meant to encompass special relativity in a more broad sense.  it can be summed up with the following statement: Mass and Energy curve space and time.

Since my first viewing of Toy Story in the theater, I have been fascinated with computer generated 3D imaging.  I took a class in 3D animation in college, where I will be learned Maya, which is an industry leading 3D graphic program.  I have had brief experience in such programs as Maya, 3D Studio Max, Light wave, TrueSpace, Cinema 4D, but the program I have learned to love the most is Bryce.  Although Bryce is fairly limited in its powers, its simplicity and ease of use were very attractive to me.

Audio editing and production also came with video, of course, since half of video is audio.  So I learned to cut audio and manipulate it to do what I needed.  Because of this, I was able to expand my audio skills beyond video, and as such I got a contract with Lisa Glick, who was the operator and manager of a local dance camp to make all of her music cuts.  Also, I was hired to record a local band, "One Quart Low", and so I did, and they released their CD with my name in the Producer credit.

My first experience with web design came in 8th grade, with a very simple personal site I made on geocities.  Then I made a very simple site for my grandfather.  Both of those sites are no longer in existence.  I used the very simple tools offered on the website's "web managers".  The first site I made using a combination of code and a wysiwyg was my cousin's site, katiekern.com was running until a few years ago.  For a while a JKC productions site was up, but It has since shut down.  My most extensive web design project, however, has been kckern.com, which is where you are right now.

I got my first taste of the wonders of MIDI with an early model keyboard our family got in the 80's.  Then, we got our first windows computer in 1995, and midi files came built in.  I didn't make the connection that it was really the same thing, until I got some midi cables and plugged that keyboard into the computer.  I could play on the keyboard and turn it into a midi file.  This also helped me out in my music composition endeavors, as I got familiar with a lot of midi authoring and musical composition software, such as Finale, Cakewalk, Musicator, Music Magic, Sibelius, Scorewriter, and Smart Score.

Graphic design is something that came in the package with video.  Videos often require titles or enhanced images, so I decided to teach myself Photoshop.  While I refined my skills in my multimedia class in 11th grade, I taught myself the basics.  Once I knew what I was doing with it, I was able to market my skill in the areas of logo design, web design and others.