Hello and welcome to Tommy's and Hongyun's website.

Here's our FAQ:

Who are Tommy and Hongyun?
Tommy and Hongyun are a happily married couple who live in Albany (next to Berkeley), California. Tommy works at and is in the process of figuring out what he wants to study for his Master's and Ph.D. Hongyun is studying on her way towards her Bachelor's degree with the full support of her husband.

Tell me more about Hongyun
She is from China and came her in March 2002. She is studying at UC Berkeley in the Art Practice department. She transfered there from De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. She is also a professional artist that shows her work at the Albany Art Gallery and 4th Street Studio in Berkeley, CA. You can see some of her work at her website

Hongyun enjoys badminton, hiking, swimming, and lots of other fun stuff.

Tell me more about Tommy
Who is Tommy
Tommy used to be a Software Test Engineer for Microsoft. What did he do there? Well quite a bit:

#1 QA Engineer: This is his primary job function. He tests client software functionality, upgrade process, and content. This involves running test cases, finding/filing bugs, researching root causes of bugs, running automated tests, and other things.

#2 Tool monkey. He has created and maintains a tool that aggregates (on a nightly basis) the number of crashes that occur on the MSN TV service and reports this in a couple of ways. First it gives the list by symbol for a particular build number within a date range. This list includes the raw data count and total percent of crashes this symbol accounts for. The second way is a graph with totals by day that compares different builds. If you look at a historical graph, since he's started on the MSN TV QA team (Feb03) to now (Nov03), he's worked to cut the number of crashes MSN TV users experience by over 60%. Currently, he's looking into adding more features to my little tool..like custom/on the fly graphs that display user-definable series on a single graph (useful for bigwigs to justify his job) and other good stuff. Another tool he is working with is the MSN TV Viewer. He's inherited this tool but hasn't done too much with it lately.

#3 Escaltions Engineer. This is really a fancy title for delving deeper into bugs. He scours MSN TV user newsgroups and websites for bug reports and tries to find the root cause and fix it (whether it's MSN TV's fault or the fault of a website).

"Whoa, that's a lot" you might be saying. Well it is, but he doesn't do every function every day. Most days he focuses on one of two things and that suffices in sucking up his time during the day.

Currently, Tommy works at a startup called Zing that creates connected devices. He has a lot of fun and carries around lots of digital toys. On his long drives to and from work (1+ hours each way!), Tommy listens to a LOT of NPR and audiobooks.

Tommy is also planning on starting on the road towards his PhD in Computer Science. He is also considering in getting a couple of other Master degrees "for fun" (these include architecture, urban planning, traffic engineering, industrial design, game design). There are of course two problems with his plans (they are the same two problems that plague almost everyone else's plans) and these are Time and Money. Of course, he'll figure a way to get it done.

How did they meet?
Tommy was visiting friends in Shanghai, China and "bumped" into Hongyun at English Corner in JingAn Park. He spoke with a bunch of people about various topics and got their email addresses. Hongyun gave to him her phone number. He decided to call her and the rest is history. After 6 trips back to China over the next 1 1/2 years, Hongyun joined him on the return trip from China on a K-1 Visa (fiance visa) and they were legally married on March 4, 2002 (although they will have their wedding ceremony in Thailand in December 2003).

What else is interesting about Tommy and Hongyun?
They used to own two electric vehicles. One was a Corbin Sparrow that Hongyun and Tommy use to drive to school and back. The other was a Th!nk Neighbor (info is coming) that they used to drive to Santana Row to study at the Borders. On days that Tommy just needed to go to work (and not go anywhere else), he drove the Th!nk Neighbor to get to the Santa Clara CalTrain Station. He then took the train to Mountain View and walked from the train station to his work (about 2-3 miles; great exercise). Those were the days.

Now, they enjoy biking around Berkeley/Albany. Berkeley is a great town that is very bike friendly. Go Bears!

Questions? email: tommysuriwong %at% gmail %dot% com