LI Shizuka is my alter ego, I guess you might say. The question comes up as to how I got that name and what does it mean. As you may have noticed, my favorite singer is Shizuka Kudo, a Japanese female vocalist. And there is (was?) a restaurant in New York City which was called "NY Shizuka." So, being from Long Island (LI), I decided to appropriate the moniker "LI Shizuka" for myself. Cute huh?
I'm a "super-senior" currently attending the State University of New York at Stony Brook, or "Stony Brook" for short. My current major is Linguistics, with a concentration in TESOL, which is Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. My ultimate plan is to teach English in Japan someday, and this is how I'm getting there.
This fall semester I am going to be pulling 22 credits, TA'ing a class in Syntax as well. I am currently working on a project for Prof. Richard Larson, constucting an online tutorial for the Syntax Computer Lab. We use a computer program called Syntactica for learning to understand and manipulate syntactic structures. This program was developed here at Stony Brook and currently runs only on NeXTSTEP, though a 32-bit Windows port is due to be released shortly.
Not me. If I'm not at school, I'm at work. I'm currently employed as a programmer for a small up-and-coming company called Informatics Corporation. At those rare moments when I'm not doing either of these, you can probably find me spodding as Defiance on The Resort, a talker I was introduced to this summer. I've made some new friends there who are very dear to me now... Friedrice, Shohoku, Chibi... this means you! If you're bored some night, try logging on and saying hi.
Well, here are my vital (or not-so-vital) statistics for the curious...