About me.
My wife and daughter are the center of my life, and the joy they provide fuels my drive to create. I love creating, both music and solutions to problems in code. When I'm not playing on the computer, I'm either playing with my daughter or playing the guitar.
And in between all that, I have become a habitual runner. I ran my first 10k in the 2012 Bluenose, and I am now training for the half-marathon next year.
Unnecessary Background. This might bore you.
I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. The year was 1983. Reagan was president. Toto won the Grammy for Album of the Year (I am not necessarily proud of this).
I was a quiet child who liked to draw, and read my father's horror novels. He really should have hidden them, because they gave me nightmares. I kept reading them, though.
Not too long after I got an NES, my friends and I had an AWESOME IDEA that we could somehow combine it with my toy computer (Sears Talking Computron). We had them both open before we realized we had no idea what we were doing.
I loved technology. I was obsessed with advertising. Using my amazing drawing skills I created several successors to the VHS format, new TVs, and next-gen gaming systems, and ads to go along with them. The Neo Geo had 24 bits, but the Edwards Gaming System (EGS) had 25 bits. We received hand-me-down computers from my uncle, first a Tandy 2500 (I think) then a Gateway 2000, that had a Cyrix 486 CPU, and ran Windows 3.11 (you know, the Workgroups one). I consistently made them unusable through my constant tinkering, and my uncle would regularly come by to re-install MS-DOS and/or Windows.
I once had an echo statment in autoexec.bat that said "YOU SUCK" (at no one in particular) before you had to press a key to start Windows. That upset my Mom. Beyond that echo statement, I never had the drive to learn more about programming, I was too obsessed with video games and music.
Around 1997, I became aware of the internet, and my friend had more advanced computers in his house, along with dial-up. With his encouragement, we learned HTML, and eventually had a website on Geocities (Hollywood/Academy/4430). It was going to be huge, bigger than MTV, Spin Magazine, and Wizard put together, and we were going to review comic books, movies, and albums. We got distracted by girls and video games, and the website was eventually deleted by Geocities around 2001 or 2002. The most notable thing about the website, aside from our rejection of the WYSIWYG editor, was a Java applet that allowed the mouse to control a spotlight over our logo. It was the future.
I got my first taste of real programming when I enrolled as an Arts student at St. Mary's University in 2005. I hadn't really thought of Computer Science as a career path, until my wife found the listing for the first year C++ class while we were trying to find electives. I registered for it, loved it, aced it, took the second half of the course, aced it, and transferred to Dalhousie, because it seemed like they had more courses/money in the program. I have completed 3 Co-Op work terms, and I'll be re-entering the real world for good in May 2012.
