Hobbies and Such

My current system is built around an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor on an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with 1 GB of RAM. I've got around a Terabyte of hard drive space. The installed graphics card is an EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS PCIe. My monitor is an Acer AL2223W 22-inch wide angle flat panel at 1680x1050 resolution.

I'm a mostly self-taught programmer, having only one semester of any formal programming training. That was for an 'Introduction to Engineering Computing Fundamentals' class and the language of choice was Fortran (input via punched cards).

My first interest in programming came while I was still in the Navy. I had a Texas Instruments programmable calculator, and I was fascinated with all of the 'trick' things you could do with it. After the Navy, I purchased a Sinclair computer kit, what was later to become the Timex/Sinclair computer. It was a puny, underpowered thing, but I spent many hours with it, sitting in front of the television, punching those miserable, undersized membrane keys. While working for Informatics, I had plenty of time to play with the 'new' IBM PC and its variant of BASIC.

After PC-BASIC, I moved into 'Power BASIC', a version of BASIC which produced stand-alone executable programs, and supported more program 'structure'. I dabbled in PASCAL just a bit, but a check of a few programming magazines convinced me that I should learn C. I purchased Turbo C 1.5, and have been using Borland's C and C++ products since that time. I consider myself fairly proficient in C programming, and probably average with C++, although I'm working on it. Probably my C++ has suffered some since I started programming with Delphi, Borland's outstanding Windows programming tool, based on Object Pascal. For programming Windows and Windows database applications, you can't beat it.

I'm currently working on some microcontroller projects, using the Parallax P8X32A (Propeller) chip, although I play with some AVR and BASIC Stamp stuff as well.