Josh Hallam

About Me

My passion is math. After I graduated college, I still bought math books, cheap Dover Editions mostly, with the hopes of studying them. I like to travel and try new foods (but I wouldn't consider myself a foodie). A lot of new foods I try, I don't like. But, you occasionally find something good that you never would have tried, like eye tacos and brain tacos. These are the states I've visited (34), and the countries I've visited (9). I've moved a lot, too, and here are the states I've lived in (6). I like to read, watch TV, play video games, and I like to hike, but I haven't done much of it since I broke my big toe a couple years ago. I enjoy coding and hope to be able to learn the Unity game engine well enough to make my own game one day with my son, who is quite the artist.



Books

My all-time favorite book is All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque. I had to read it my freshman year in high school and didn't appreciate it at all. I reread it while on my 3rd deployment and the book really spoke to me. It is crazy that I could identify with the life of an infantryman from another country's army and 100 years ago. All the BS that he describes is the same as today. My biggest difference was that he missed his friends because they were killed, and I missed mine because their contracts ended and they left the Army.

One book, more than any other has inspired me in life, and that was A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan. It's about Operation Market-Garden, the largest airborne operation in the history of the world. It was thanks to that book that I wanted to become a paratrooper. While in the Army and reading other books about paratroopers in WWII, I learned that Ryan's books exaggerated a lot for the sake of storytelling. Otherwise, that book would be on my list of favorites, too.

In general, I like Sci-Fi, Fantasy, History, Military (fiction and non-fiction)

Favorite Books, (in no particular order)



TV Shows



Video Games

The first video game I remember playing was The Legend of Zelda for the NES. I was young enough that I had no idea what I was doing, but I had fun wandering around the world and fighting enemies. Even though it isn't a single game, the Mass effect Trilogy is my all-time favorite game. Mass Effect is actually what got me into science. Before that game, I wouldn't have said I was a Sci-Fi fan, even though I did enjoy some of it, and I never would have thought I liked science. But, after playing the 1st Mass Effect, I got lost in its world. I read every codex entry, I read every description of the planets, I talked to every character I found. I started reading about science on my free time and started to want to work in the private space industry, paving the way for the first manned mission to Mars, and, hopefully, future colonization.

Favorite Video Games