First up, some history. I grew up in the south side of Switzerland (the valley) right at the border of Italy within the beautiful and famous Swiss Alps. When I was 25 years old, and after 3 years of schooling, I received my diploma as a car body painter but left my job in pursuit of something greater.

So in 1998 I moved to Los Angeles, where I went to Santa Monica College to major in Computer Science. There I started PenPal World, which was just an idea I had in the middle of a sleepless night. Also then I met Linda, who's Vietnamese, and we married in 1999 in Santa Ana. Today we have three daughters, Emma Rae, 2001, Alexis Leigh, 2003, and Sophie Anne, 2007.

After graduating from college in 2001 I got accepted to CalState Long Beach University. However, instead of going back to school I decided to jump into the working world and started working as a webmaster for television.com. After that I was hired as a web programmer at Sony Pictures Entertainment for 3 years. In Spring 2004, after my time with Sony, my family and I moved to Connecticut where my wife opened her Vietnamese restaurant (Vietnamese Bistro). For some reason we never felt really at home there so after a short time we decided to move back to Northern California close to Sacramento. We yet moved again in Summer 2007 to Yorba Linda after being asked by the Walt Disney Internet Group in North Hollywood to work for them as a senior web programmer. Only 4 years later Disney laid off over 200 employees and I was one of them. I now work for my own company and it's much more fun being my own boss :)

Things I really like: spending time with my family, long-distance running, programming, swimming, bicycling, traveling, movies, music of every conceivable type, bookstores, and exploring the secrets of this wonderful planet.

Things I dislike: smoking, drinking, drugs, selfish and arrogant people. Plus racism and war but you knew that.

I've been an avid runner since April 2005. So far I ran 107 races including 9 half marathons, 43 marathons, 16 31 miler, 8 50 miler, 2 62 miler, 14 100 miler, and one 144 miler (twice around Lake Tahoe California non-stop in 41 hours). I'm a runner; it's my deep found passion and going long distances is what interests me. "Through suffering we can have a better impression of who we really are and what we can do and how we can affect other people." David Horton.

Some people emailed me thinking that PenPal World is a big company. The truth is that PenPal World is run only by myself since the very beginning. Mostly, I work on PenPal World from my home office in California (shown on the right) but sometimes also from my laptop anywhere in the world. PenPal World is a 365 days a year job spending between 2 to 6 hours a day validating pictures, removing inappropriate profiles, answering emails, thinking about features and programming them. Everything you use and see at PenPal World I came up with and programmed myself. In fact, I already programmed PenPal World 8 times from scratch since 1998 to apply my latest programming knowledge to it.

Now go ahead and enjoy PenPal World. And don't forget to tell your friends about it!