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Date of Birth: 19 October 1989
First Word: "Dada"
First Sentence: "Daddy, buy more doughnut balls!" 28 June 1992
Favorite Color: Blue

My full name is Christopher Blair Tucker, although I like to be called Toph. (As a wee little one I had trouble pronouncing the hard "C" and "r" sounds, hence the abbreviation.)

Some of my various interests include Star Wars, computers, reading, science, business, history... and a lot of other things. :-) I attend Beaver Country Day School (grades 6-12); previously I had gone to Bowen Elementary School.

I started this web site under the tutelage of my older brother John in 1999, for no particular reason. It does not have a purpose, it does not have a focus. But it's fun to make, and I hope it's fun to look around, so I'm happy to have it.

Family

My dad is Dick Tucker, and my mom is Lisa Tucker. I have an older brother John, an older sister Annie, and a younger (by 23 months 1 week and 12 hours) brother Willy. We also have a cute little golden retriever named Rosie.

My maternal grandparents, Austin and Annie Lyne, live in Concord Massachusetts. My paternal grandparents, Frank and Dorothy Tucker, passed away before I was born. My mom is one of six, so we have lots of uncles, aunts, and cousins. You can read about some of them on the Extended Family page.

TuckLyne
Main site: http://www.tucklyne.com

It was the summer of 1999 at Taconnet, which is the place in Maine my family goes over summer vacation. My grandparents were visiting, and one day Willy and I found ourselves at our cabin with them with nothing to do. (My parents were at some tennis thing, I think.) We started playing around with what we could make out of newspaper from our fireplace supply. By the end of the day our deck was littered with "Hat Balls", "Javelin Throws" and "Ring Tosses." That night at dinner we assigned roles to everyone present and declared ourselves the Executives Committee of TuckLyne Inc.

TuckLyne's most successful product was not one that had been invented out of newspaper the summer of 1999. Instead, homemade business cards were. A couple of years after TuckLyne was founded (and again at Taconnet), I took that idea to a new company: Athena. Soon thereafter, I determined I had preferred TuckLyne, and decided TuckLyne would buy Athena. So now Humpty Dumpty has been put back together again by all the king's horses and all the king's men.

Finally, there's TuckLyne Studios, which has been by far the most active in recent years. TuckLyne Studios was formed when a couple of my friends and I were making a movie and need some name to put in the credits. Check out the web site for more information.

Star Wars
Main site: http://www.tophtucker.com/starwars

I'm a bit of a fan of Star Wars. Yeah, just a bit. ;-) I've seen the movies in theaters 26 times total, and would be more than happy to see them some more. (2007 30th Anniversary 3D re-releases, anyone?)

I have a small Star Wars site with photos, reviews, and more. Check it out for more information.

Microsoft and the Xbox
Vista | Windows Live | Office Live | Xbox

I'm also a big fan of Microsoft, and high-tech whizbangery in general. Want to know what the coolest things happening in the tech world right are right now (aka as of last update, which may or may not have been some time in the past decade)? Well, here are a few of my personal favorites. (For more news consider subscribing [by mail] to WIRED or [by RSS] to Engadget. They're a good bit more timely than I, although I reckon they'd disagree with some of what I think is "cool.")

Windows Vista

The next version of Windows is going to be Windows Vista, which comes just over five years after Windows XP (yikes!). When it hits shore shelves this winter, it will feature... well, a lot less, but let's present the half-full glass:

• A much more secure foundation

• Better graphical capabilites; 3D animation etc.

• Gadgets, similar to Apple's Widgets (not to mention countless other programs over the years; even Windows)

• Much-improved integrated video editing, DVD burning, photo management, music management, and more

• Some new included games, like Chess :-)

• Internet Explorer 7, with tabbed browsing, improved security, better printing capabilities, RSS reader & favorites, and more

• Powerful Parental Controls let parents control what games their kids can play, how they browse the web, and more.

Windows Live

These days, at Microsoft it's all about Live. Xbox Live has long been the online counterpart to Xbox; now the other two big divisions, Windows and Office, have their own online counterparts in Windows Live and Office Live.

Windows Live is Microsoft's answer to the nonstop juggernaut that is Google. It's taking all of Microsoft's online services, most of them from MSN, and revamping and unifying them. The aim is to provide a faster turn-around than the relatively sluggish Windows division. It's now churning out cool new stuff at an amazing pace. There are already over a dozen *free* services you can test out; here's an overview of some of them.

Live.com is the home of all things Live, and an excellent personalizable home page. Collate all your latest news, weather, games, and other neat gadgets. Create multiple tabbed pages, each with a different set of customized news, weather, games, and more.

Windows Live Local is kind of like Google Earth -- get satellite imagery or street maps, directions, find businesses, and more. The difference is that it's a web site accessible from any computer -- it should really be compared more to Google Maps. Instead of Google Earth's image-warping angling effect, get ACTUAL 45-degree views of houses, cities, buildings, etc. And, coming soon, actually virtually "drive" around major cities and see the storefronts from street level. Another upcoming feature: when you find a business listing, call it (for free!) straight from your computer just by clicking.

Windows Live Mail, the successor to Hotmail. Drag & drop messages, right-click and Shift-click to your heart's delight (context menus & multi-select, respectively), customize the interface, get more storage, faster response, AutoComplete, better message search, and more.

Windows Live Messenger, the successor to MSN Messenger. Sharing folders let you upload files to share with a friend. When one of you updates the file, it updates for both of you. Great collaboration tool. Also: slick new interface, contacts search, and Live Contacts (see below). And plus, you get to talk to all your Yahoo! friends without having to have Yahoo! Messenger. Take that, AIM/Talk/iChat.

Windows Live QnA lets you ask a question - any question - to the community and have then answer it for you. You get points for answering questions and voting for best answers, which can be seen by anyone who views your profile.

Live Contacts lets you "subscribe" to your friends' contact info a la Plaxo. Never again be in the dark about a change of address; Live Contacts updates your address book for you.

Here's an overview of just some of what else Windows Live has to offer:

• Windows Live Search - successor to MSN Search. Try searching for "what is the height of Mount Everest," or "who was the 13th president of the united states," or "who killed martin luther king."

• Windows Live Expo - post classifieds a la Craigslist or Google Base. Restrict visibility to your social network if you want.

• Windows Live Favorites - store favorites online and synchronize between computers.

• Windows Live OneCare Family Safety

• Windows Live Writer - makes it easy to post to your blog, whether it's on Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, or most anywhere else.

• and more.

Windows Live Ideas is the official spot for learning about and testing new Live services. Almost every service's team has a blog; check them out for all the latest on development.

Office Live

First of all, Office Live is NOT online productivity software a la OpenOffice, just as Xbox Live isn't just online games and Windows Live isn't an online operating system. Rather, like Xbox Live offers online gaming services and Windows Live offers online personal services, Office Live offers online business services; specifically, small business services.

Currently, at the main Office Live Web Site, small businesses can begin testing three tiers of service:

• Office Live Basics lets you create a dot-com web site totally FOR FREE. You get whatever URL you want, as long as its not taken, as well as hosting and easy-to-use (yet powerful) web site creation and management tools. Free site tracking, free "@yourdomain.com" email addresses -- free free free.

• Office Live Collaboration gives you the tools to manage your company, including shared collaboration sites, customer manager, employee manager, corporate calendar, expense management, hiring tools, marketing tools, shared storage, and much much more.

• Office Live Essentials combines Basics and Collaboration into one comprehensive small-business package.

All services are free during beta testing. The latter two will cost $29.99 from then on.

Xbox & Xbox Live
My 360's Blog

Ever since in launched in November 2002, Xbox Live has been the shining star of Microsoft's gaming endeavors. It reached 1 million subscribers faster than any other paid service, ever. More recently, the Xbox Live Marketplace (where every Xbox 360 owner can download trailers [for movies and games], demos, music videos, and more) hit 10 million downloads faster than iTunes.

When it launched, it was a unified online gaming platform that gave gamers a persistent identity and friends list across all games, with voice chat in every game. Since then, it has grown immensely.

With Xbox Live on Xbox 360, gamers can now:

• Play online, of course -- even against friends on the original Xbox.

• Keep track of your friends -- see what game they're playing and how they're doing, right down to the score in a football game.

• Send voice and text messages to any friend, in any game, from any game -- or watching a DVD or browsing the Marketplace, for that matter.

• Voice chat with anyone, from any game, to any game. Keep your chat going even while you switch games.

• Download demos, trailers, and more from the aforementioned Marketplace

• Browse, demo, and buy any game in the Xbox Live Arcade, which lets you download arcade classics and new quick little games straight to your console. The best one? Geometry Wars, by far. :) (Keep reading...)

• Keep track of their Achievements, like beating a game, unlocking a character, or getting a high score of over 1,000,000, and compare it to your friends'.

• Compare achievements and track stats and friends status online, via Xbox.com

You can see my Gamer Card at the top of this page. See the G and the number? That's how many gamer points I've earned from playing games. See the five icons at the bottom? Those are the last five games I've played.

Chances are Geometry Wars is one of them. (Look for the white pentagon [with one side missing] in the circle.) Geometry Wars, from the creators of Project Gotham Racing, is the best Arcade game I've ever played, and one of the best games, period. The graphics are simple at first -- your pentagon-ship versus square-ships, rhombus-ships, and triangle-ships -- but as the game progresses, the incredible explosion effects (think fireworks) and gravity-warping, frame-dragging (you can actually see the frame) black holes create a stunning (and sometimes overwhelming) effect.

So, um, basically... I love Geometry Wars. :)

BSEC
Main Site: http://bsec.blogspot.com

BSEC stands for Beaver Science and Engineering Club (or Beaver Society for Environmental Catastrophe, as one teacher put it). It's a club that two friends (Peter Wilmot and Vivek Pai) and I formed in the Fall of 2005. So far, we've:

• Fired a potato gun several times and burned holes into my BCDS sweatshirt

• Launched eggs up in rockets, attempted to return them to the ground unharmed

• Burned ethanol and blown flour on top

Egg Launch

Vivek's vessel, which was actually not rocket-powered but rather shot from the potato gun, exploded. Peter's engine shot up through the body, through the egg, and out the top -- and the rocket stayed on the launch pad. And mine... well, I'm not quite sure what went wrong, but as the egg capsule parachuted to the ground we found that the plastic cup holding the egg had split.

Flour and Ethanol

Flour burns, at least when it's airborne and in powdered form. We had heard as much, but were beginning to doubt it after much candle-based experimentation. We soon got some ethanol, though, and with a bigger flame underneath we found that the flour actually exploded quite nicely... right in Vivek's face. :)

Miscellany

LEGOs are pretty cool. I mean, who doesn't like Legos? My brother used to have a whole Lego city in his bedroom, but then it was overtaken by a "Rokenbok" thing. Now it has become a giant K'Nex roller coaster (which the Dell Support guy who came to our house was obsessed with). Speaking of which, a K'Nex pinball machine is under construction there now! Well... kind of. Not really. Let's just say there have been a few delays.

In addition to all that other neat stuff, I like several other companies... I tend to form strong corporate loyalties. :) Intel is neat... our Intel webcam allows us to videoconference with people over the internet or make home movies without a camcorder, as long as we don't need to move the wired camera more than a couple feet. And Viiv (rhymes with five) sounds cool, too.

In September 2002 (or was it 2001? Maybe it was...) I completed a report on DaimlerChrysler AG for school. Check out the the Library to view it.

I also love pretty much everything about computers, the web, robots, and cars. Hehe. :) For fun Macromedia Shockwave games, check out shockwave.com or candystand.com or zone.com or something... at least, those were my favorites back when I wrote this, many years ago.

So there are a couple of my interests... I think I'm going to have a lot of trouble deciding what to do with my life. :) Software programmer, inventor, physicist, movie-maker, writer, architect, graphic designer, or web designer... what will it be? Uh-oh.