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who, or what, is howard?

Howard as a South Park character
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Howard defies explanation. Perhaps it may be helpful to begin with an exploration of the things which Howard is not.

Having done that, let us now examine what Howard actually is.

Howard currently is employed by Move.com as a software engineer (programmer in non-buzzword terminology), despite never having studied computer science, and holding degrees in Psychology and East Asian Studies. All this goes to show is that what you study in college will most likely end up completely useless to you in your career. He has worked on projects as diverse as Capcom, Edison International, Reebok, Caesars Entertainment, GM, and Microsoft. Howard is capable of object-oriented programming in C#, VB.NET, PHP, VBScript, Java, and Perl, not to mention quite fluent in client-side technologies like Javascript and CSS. He is also a big fan of storing data in XML and displaying it with XSL transformations (not done on this site, unfortunately, as PHP's XML support is still lacking). Homestore is located in Westlake Village, California, a ten-mile drive from home.

Prior to Homestore, Howard was employed by Zentropy Partners, an interactive client services agency. ZP's office was located in the historic Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles, a 40-mile, 1-hour commute. Despite the distance, he held this position for five long years, accumulating 125,000 miles on his vehicles' odometers (including ZP's pre-move location in a not-so-nice part of Hollywood, replete with transvestite hookers).

Growing up, programming was anathema to Howard, as it was his father's profession and Howard was in his teenage rebel phase. Upon returning from Japan and Taiwan in 1997, he decided to learn HTML for the heck of it and built two horribly embarrassing personal web sites. After working for two years in a sales account management position which he came to loathe beyond belief, Howard eventually turned his eye toward the Internet and was able to secure a job with CNation as "traffic coordinator." However, with less than 20 employees, that position was somewhat superfluous and he found himself with time to learn Javascript (thanks to Danny Goodman's Javascript Bible), the first programming he had done since a smattering of BASIC in high school. In less than one year, he gained valuable experience producing the Capcom USA web site and had, solely by winging it, programmed a PHP/MySQL-driven site for the JET Alumni Association. CNation soon went under, but by then, Zentropy had called.

In what spare time he has, Howard fosters cats for Kitten Rescue, a non-profit organization dedicated to saving the lives of felines from the LA City Shelters. Since December 1999, over 50 cats have temporarily been housed with Nancy and Howard before finding permanent homes. Nancy and Howard also volunteer for the Cancer Hope Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

He is married to Nancy, three years his younger. Before her retirement to take care of the girls full-time, Nancy was employed as an "associate" at Wilshire Associates, a financial consulting firm, in Santa Monica. Wilshire's major owner is Dennis Tito, the man who famously paid $25 million to go to the International Space Station in April 2001.

On the political compass, Howard scores -6.00 on the Economic Left/Right scale, and -5.44 on the Social Libertarian/Authoritarian scale.

Thanks to a spelling error by a Japanese woman at the hotel services desk at Narita Airport, Howard is also known as "Horard" (despite her copying the name from his passport).

At this time, Howard has no further comments for the press. Please direct all inquiries to his publicist.