Sinphony

Hi, I'm Igor Sinyak, enjoying life for the 28th year, now living in California, San Francisco bay area. If I were to outline my life, it might look something like this:

Career: I am a Senior Software Engineer at Intel , in Santa Clara, CA, working on 3D graphics, as you can see in my resume. I manage a team in Russia, so I often travel to there and Europe. I've been at Intel almost 8 years, previously working on digital video architecture and compression algorithms. I am now eligible for my sabbatical!
Education: I did my graduate work at Stanford (Decision Analysis) and Columbia (Electrical Engineering). My undergrad days were in Philadelphia at Drexel U., in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Want details? How about graduation pics?
: I've played piano/keyboards for 15 years now, spending a lot of time composing. Do you have pianist envy? ;-) My music is a mix of new age and classical; melodic, intense, passionate. Listen to some of my songs online.
Listening to Music: My listening tastes are clustered around a triangle of:
Supporting/Promoting Music: I edit and publish Rising Force, an online digest covering Neoclassical Metal. The genre can be described as classical or classically-influenced music performed with the sound of modern-day metal. Classical music that exemplified virtuosity on violin and piano can now be heard with all the intensity and flawless technique of guitar and keyboards.
: Since graduating, I've lived in the Philadelphia, Princeton, Phoenix, Portland, and Palo Alto areas. Anyone see a pattern? :-) What's next, Paris?
Travel: Aside from traveling to Russia on business, I take frequent trips for business and pleasure, closing in on the quest for 1 million frequent flyer miles. I now have enough to fly on the Concorde - this will probably be for my honeymoon (whomever that will be with :). To me, one of the best things about traveling is having someone to visit when you get there. If you enjoy visitors, please let me know, and I will look you up next time I'm in your area. Of course, you should feel free to look me up if you're ever in the bay area, and you might just find yourself invited to whatever my friends and I are up to that day/night!
The places I visit most often are Phoenix, Portland, Philadelphia, New York, and Moscow. However, a great technique for seeing new places is connecting in a different city each time. This is easily possible because of various code share agreements, or just by using creative routing.
Family: My parents live near Philadelphia, PA, and my sister goes to Penn State. See some pictures of them.
Friends: Friends are your chosen family. Pictures!
: I appreciate art and decor that is rich and creative with vibrant color. Favorite styles are impressionism, pointillism, realism, and surrealism.
Performing Arts: One of the advantages of always living near big cities is the availability of culture. I thoroughly enjoy theater, some opera and ballet, but most of all musicals, my favorite being a tear-jerking performance of Les Mis&eacuterables on Broadway.
Athletics: Table tennis is my favorite sport to play, probably the one I'm best at. Others include tennis, volleyball, and step aerobics. The only time you'll find me watching sports on TV is the Olympics, especially the Ice Dancing.
Ballroom Dancing: I recently got back to ballroom dancing. This was great fun in undergrad, and I've started taking group and private lessons again. My favorites are the Tango, 2-step, not the country kind!) Salsa, and Swing. I'm currently looking for a partner.
Russian: I am fluent in Russian. Comes in handy when I have to call my team for weekly status meetings, and the 11 hour time difference gives me an excuse to come into work late :-)
Humor/Wordplay: After spending some time in Arizona, I now have a dry sense of humor. Ok, I'm an incurable punster. I love to play with words. You can catch examples of that all throughout my pages. I'm sure you've figured out that Sinphony is a play on my last name, Sinyak, and symphony. The result evokes images of symphonic passion yet with a sinful playfulness. I'm also taking an improvisational comedy class which is incredibly fun. The hardest part is learning how NOT to think and analyze the situation, but just to react spontaneously.
Poetry: My tastes in poetry are easy to understand - I like well crafted rhyme and rhythm. Sonnets are genius, I really like the structure imposed by it yet so craftfully filled by master wordsmiths.
: I guess the origins of my support for feminism are rooted in seeing my mother, an engineer in a male dominated field, get paid and treated as a woman at work, rather than a mind. I feel it important to document my views.
Romance
Aspirations: I am seriously evaluating the prospect of getting an MBA. This would require taking two years off from a job that I love and spending an astronomical sum on tuition. I think it's best to do it full time; I feel an MBA education is very dependent on daily student interaction. Does anyone have any experience with such a decision?

Feel free to drop me a line.
Igor.Sinyak@intel.com Last modified on: October 19, 1999 .