User:RyudoLee

Ryudo Lee is a roleplay character. But the man behind the character is completely different than what is portrayed in his roleplaying character. Outside of roleplaying and on the internet, Ryudo Lee's creator is known as Rai.

Home
Rai lives near New Orleans, Louisiana. He currently resides with his parents, and two cats. One of the cats is his, one that he had taken in post-Katrina, a male orange tabby named Sonny. The other belongs to his parents: a female grey tabby named Sissy. There is also a parakeet living with his family, named Turrette.

He owns a car, a white '07 Pontiac Grand Prix. He used to have a blue '94 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra S, but after some serious mechanical failures he went and traded it in to buy his current automobile. He also used to own a red '94 Chevrolet Beretta, but had gotten into an accident after coming home post-Katrina, and so the Beretta was considered a total loss by the insurance company.

He is not in any kind of relationship with a woman, though he has had several girlfriends in the past. His most lasting relationship lasted for four years.

Computers
Rai is a professional computer repair technician, having earned the CompTIA A+ certification and the EXIN ITIL Foundation certification. Due to this, he was able to get a government contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, to work as IT Support for the immigration offices in New Orleans, which is his current occupation.

On the side, he is an amateur computer programmer and amateur database administrator, specializing in Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic 2005, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Though he has developed a complete program that has been sold to other companies, and has developed many demo programs, he is not active in the Visual Basic community.

He has been working with computers since the early days of DOS and Windows 3.1 His first computer was an IBM 286 that ran DOS 2.0 as it's operating system. Since then he has owned no less than ten computers, including laptops and PocketPC's. His earliest programming experience was with the DOS version of BASIC, and then later he worked with PASCAL 7.0

Gaming
Rai is an avid gamer. He owns almost every single Nintendo brand console, from the NES up to the Nintendo Wii. He also owns a Playstation 2. Most of his video gaming is done on his PC, that he built himself, which sports an Intel dual core processor and an nVidia video card. His favorite types of video games are first person shooters, real time strategy, and role playing. He has accounts on many online games including Furcadia, Guild Wars, Maple Story, and many others, under various names. The very first video game he ever played was Duck Hunt on the NES.

He also enjoys playing Dungeons & Dragons and other games of that style. He is part of a gaming group that meets several times a month to play these games. He has also created a few of these games, and in one he featured his own character, Ryudo Lee.

Rai's Katrina Story
Rai is one of the luckier survivors of Hurricane Katrina. At the time of the hurricane, Rai was living in a second floor apartment in Metairie, Louisiana. A few days before the storm, he stocked up on food and drinks, and also froze several two-liters of water in his freezer. The night before the storm, his car was moved to his parents house in an effort to keep it safe.

Rai weathered the storm in his apartment. Power was lost late in the evening, a tree started leaning against the building, another tree broke and fell in the parking lot area, yet another tree broke and fell in the lot behind the building, and some of his windows began to leak, but there was no serious damage to the building he was living in. The next morning, after the storm had passed, he went out to survey the area. There was no flood damage, the fallen trees only pulled down power lines, and there was only one broken window, but it belonged to his downstairs neighbor. The apartment building across the street from where he was living was not so fortunate. A large oak tree had broken and fallen into the building, breaking some walls and collapsing roofs.

Without transportation, Rai had to stay there for two more days. And since he forgot to buy batteries for his radio, he had no idea of what had happened in New Orleans. Eventually, some cell phone reception had been restored and he was able to get in touch with his family, and that was when he learned about the breaches in the levees in New Orleans.

The next morning he took his car, which was unharmed, and loaded all his valuables from his apartment into it. From there, he and his family drove to Franklin, Louisiana, which is two hours away from New Orleans, to stay with his grandparents until they were allowed to go back. During the trip up there, though, Rai got sick, which eventually became laryngitis. After getting to Franklin, he spent the next several days taking medication and trying to sleep off his illness.

About a week after arriving in Franklin, he got a call from the law offices he was working at and they told him that he needed to show up for work at their offices in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was another hour long drive from Franklin. Fortunately, an old friend from high school was attending the University of Louisiana at that time, which is located in Lafayette, and he agreed to put up Rai in his dormatory. Although UL policy stated that students should not house Katrina refugees, many students were doing it anyway. Neither Rai nor his friend got caught.

After two weeks in Lafayette, the firm announced that their office in Mandeville, Louisiana, which is only at most a half hour drive from where Rai was living in Metairie, had finally been reopened and that everyone could relocate there. Rai collected his belongings from his friend's dormatory and his grandparent's house, and went back to his apartment. Fortunately he walked into his apartment and found that all utilities had been restored. He had working power, water, gas, as well as cable television and internet. The corner store, a CVS which had not been looted, was also open for business, and many of his neighbors were returning home at that time as well.

He worked at the Mandeville office until the friday before city officials said that people could come back into New Orleans. That friday afternoon, Rai loaded his cars with several computers that had been taken from the building where the law firm was located before the storm, so that he could take them back to the building so people could work. Unfortunately, that is when he was involved in the car accident that claimed his Beretta.

Rai was driving towards New Orleans on Airline Drive. Since the city had just opened up, many of the traffic lights were not working. As a stop gap, stop signs mounted on aluminum tripods were placed where the traffic lights were. Rai was in the far right hand lane. He saw the stop sign and was coming to a stop. The person in the next lane over also saw the stop sign and was coming to a stop. The person behind the car in the next lane did not see the stop sign and was not going to stop, and swerved to the right to avoid hitting the car in front of him, and hit Rai's car instead, sending his car into the stop sign, a bus bench, and just barely missed a tree. The accident was considered the other driver's fault for not coming to a stop. The insurance company of the other driver claimed Rai's car was a total loss, and paid him more than the Blue Book value of the car, when it was in good condition. Rai was more or less unharmed by the accident, except for a small hairline fracture in the cartilage of his chest. Now whenever the weather changes, he feels a slight pressure in his chest.

Rai took the money from the insurance company and bought the Oldsmobile from one of the ladies that his father worked with. It was a garage kept car, and had the exact same engine that the Beretta had. Unfortunately, when they went to do the title transfer, they found that the car had been flagged as flooded out. As it turned out, the owners of the car had fled before the storm and left the car behind. They did not know what had happened to the car and reported to their insurance company that it had been flooded out. After a few phone calls to the DMV and their insurance company, it was finally straightened out, Rai had his car, and the Katrina ordeal was finally over, at least for Rai.