A Day in Paradise

Hiro Nakamura from heroes is actually a code warrior in real life. His profile can be found at this great wired article.

“I’ve been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college,” said Oka. “ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence.”

Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.

If you haven’t watched Heroes get started now, we’re only half way into the first season. Hiro Nakamura and his very broken engrish is definitely the hero!

A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.

In other geek news the IT Crowd is coming back on Jan 5th. The DVD is also out (with L33T subtitles), just incase you’re wondering what to buy me for Christmas. If you’re wondering what the php connection is… IT Crowd consultant Yoz frequents #phpc and is rockstar programmer at ning PHP coders are also geeks and enjoy geeky shows like Heroes and IT Crowd.

Happy Holidays!