About Me

Hey,

I was born in 1992, (August 14 to be more exact), to my mom and dad in Braila, Romania. My parents were actually living in Bucharest, but since my maternal grandparents live in Braila, and my maternal grandfather was the head of the Hospital in the city, my mom gave birth to me there. The history was going to repeat itself five years later with my sister. Now, you must understand the setting in which I was born. It was 2 years and a half since the fall of communism in December 1998. I guess that by being born in an ex-Commie country, I lost all my future republican supporters. Meh, I’ll make up to you guys some time later. So, as I was saying I was born in Braila. There was nothing special about me at birth as I was about average. For the next three years I lived mostly in Braila. Those were probably the best three years of my life. From the day I was born, I also started to grow, reaching a full 1 meter when I was one. My suspicion is that the hospital must have tested a mushroom power up and now I was the Big Alex. Or I might have just got the genes from my maternal grandfather. To put it in perspective the average kid is anywhere from 0.7 meters to 0.8 meters when they are 1. Funny story about my life as a one year old, is how people would ask my mom/grandparents if I was not too old to still be in a baby carriage. They would also try to talk to me, but I did not know what to say back. These two factors + my height made people think I had some kind of handicap.




Future posts might also reference my grandparents, especially my maternal ones, so I am going to take a moment here and explain them. They are the epitome of “bloody awesome”. Every day my grandfather would take me to the park, where I would ride my bike, or we would play basketball. At five I managed to literally break my bike in half. My grandfather just welded it together. Some days we would also go to the Danube waterfront and ride my bike over there. It is also with him that I drove for the first time, in a parking lot on a manual transmission car (so much manlier than an automatic transmission). His father was a WW2 veteran. During the war he received the Romanian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, for escaping without losing any men, after he was surrounded my Russians and heir tanks. My grandmother was the one who was in charge of our moral upbringing. First of all it was her that would tell us about what’’s right or not, and whenever we would do badly at school, she would give us a talk that was a lot more pleasant than the one from my parents. My sister and I also used to joke that she had a bottomless bag, as she would always make us sweets. She also gave up smoking when I was little, so that I wouldn’t have to inhale the smoke. Awfully nice of her, isn’t it?

Not much happened until I got to school, as kindergarten was all about fun and games for me as the lessons were relatively easy. The few things that did happen were that my sister was born in 1997 on August the 28th. While she was still in my mom’s womb, I would often ask for my mom to open her mouth, so that I could talk to my baby sister. At the time she was born, my mom was also taking her second degree in Computer Science, the first being Mathematics. As a result when my sister was 6 months or so, I would often baby sit her until my mom would come back, although I was only 5 and a half.

The first two years of school were spent at a primary school in downtown Bucharest. The theory was that because it was newly renovated and had relatively state of the art facilities, it would be a good school. My primary school teacher turned out to be really bad. In Romania you have the same primary school teacher in all four years (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade). I would always finish my in class assignments early, and I would then get up and help others. Of course the teacher hated this, but she refused to give me extra work. In 3rd grade my moved me to the school she was teaching for one year at that time. That school was good. It was really good actually. In grade four I started learning programming. I would usually leave school with my mom, but two days a week she would do extra programming with a group of older kids. I figured I can understand what she is talking about, so I joined the group. In the following three years, I went to the National Olympics where I would constantly place in the top 5 or top 10. In grade 7, I tried an application type program for the first time in Visual Basic. At the beginning of grade 8, I came to Canada. Here I entered in grade 9, as we start school at 7 years old in Romania. At this point I had given up on the Computer Science needed for Olympics, and I instead focused on software. Immigrating to Canada at the age of 14 was not that carefree. I had to pickup English fast. As a result I refused to take an ESL class. I was supposed to take two more ESL level classes in English, but I refused to do so, and I went to Academic instead. In December grade 9, after only 3 months of being in Canada, I wrote the entrance exam for the TOPS program, which I found out about through sheer luck. Fortunately I was accepted in grade 10, I started going to this wonderful Math and Science program. In grade 10, we took grade 10 and grade 11 math. The supply teacher who taught these two courses, due to the maternity leave of the usual teacher, also taught us induction, matrices and complex numbers. In grade 11, we took the AP calculus BC course for which we then wrote the AP exam. That kinda leaves us to where the other posts started so in case you didn’t read them, go back to and read them so you would know what happened since I wrote the calc APs

Languages I speak: Romanian, English, French, Pascal, C++, Assembler(not too fluent), Java, Visual Basic, Visual C++(again not too fluent), HTML, PHP, MYSQL

Height: 6’6” or 2 meters tall

Nicknames Big Al (my Physx teacher) or G-raph (spelling isn’t wrong; by my Romanian friends)