Hi. My name is Lexi Baugher, and I'm a geek. I work as a software engineer at Google, a really spiffy search engine. I have worked on Google Answers, Froogle, the AdWords API, and Blogger. I graduated in June 2001 from Caltech with a B.S. in Computer Science. If you want to know what I'm up to now, check out our blog.
People who are not from California will occasionally think of us as 'crunchy granola'. Yes, I'm a proud owner of a nifty Toyota Prius; and if that Prius had a bumper sticker, it would be "Make Butter, Not Guns"; I have been known to eat soy-cheese pizza; and I ride my bike to work sometimes and complain about being almost run over by SUVs. In my defense, though, I like bacon on my soy-cheese pizza, and I'd rather think of myself as geek. I like to cook (Alton Brown's cookbook is my favorite), mess around with computers, and build stuff. Legos are neat. One goal is to get better at welding and go on Junkyard Wars. My musical tastes tend towards metal and punk and generally anythingthat can be played loud (The Donnas are a great local band, I've liked The Offspring since I was in junior high, and there's nothing quite like driving through rush hour to the tune of Bad Religion).
I got to do lots of neat stuff at Caltech. Normally a full courseload and a few part time jobs doesn't leave enough time for sleep, but one of my part time jobs was as an operator at the Center for Advanced Computing Research, so it all worked out. I was the head TA for the CS 1,2,3 sequence of first year programming courses, so I've seen every imaginable bug in a Hello World program. I am a Scurve and spent two years waiting tables at dinner (one year head waiter). I did some systems administration work for Whyville one year, and spent a year on the Board of Control, and have heard every imaginable excuse for copying a Hello World program from somebody else. I spent two years as the Business Manager for the California Tech, the undergraduate student newspaper.
I also got to take a lot of classes. I spent most of my junior year in the lab with EE 5x, programming chips in EE50, writing assembly in EE51, and building an audio recorder in EE52. I spent most of my senior year in another lab for CS 134 writing a compiler and kernel hacking.
So after I graduated from Caltech, I got married to my best friend, obtained some ferrets, got a job, and moved to San Francisco. I used to have pet rats too, but they died of old age. They were really cute. (So are the ferrets. Cute, I mean, not dead.)