Introduction

Greetings, and welcome to my home page! If you are a return visitor you probably noticed that I've remodeled the site. It's a bit sparse right now but this is just a placeholder until I finish coding my new site. I decided it was better to have this partial new site up than the very old, very outdated one that was here before.

I am a 33 year old independent Linux consultant/programmer for hire specializing in data mining and billing applications. I am experienced in a number of computer languages including C/C++, Java, Perl, PHP and ColdFusion. I am also familiar with the development and management of databases in both MySQL and Oracle. However, when given a choice I prefer to work in Perl and MySQL.

Background

I've been programming most of my life. My first introduction to a real computer was in 4th grade, when my family moved from Detroit to Grosse Ile. We had a Commodore PET in the classroom and I took an immediate interest in it, spending as much time as possible playing on it. Back then we either loaded software from cassette tape or entered them by hand from printed program listings. It didn't take me long to teach myself the dialect of BASIC the computer used, and pretty soon I was writing my own simple programs.

Eventually I convinced my family to buy me a TI-99/4A home computer, which was pretty cutting edge back then. I have fond memories of entering programs by hand from listings printed in Family Computing magazine. I wrote my first game on my TI, it was called "Shoot a Man" and was nothing more than a little stick figure falling from a random location at the top of the screen that you had to shoot by moving a little turret back and forth a long the bottom of the screen ("Space Invaders"-style).

When I reached 6th grade (which was the next year; I was double-promoted and skipped 5th grade) I was introduced to the Apple II line of computers. My grandparents bought me an Apple IIe and eventually an Apple IIgs, which is probably the most fun computer I've ever owned. I even wrote shareware for the Apple II including NuPak GS, Alert Sound, and the Future Vision BBS system. I loved my IIgs so much I actually sat down and wrote an emulator a few years ago called XGS that lets you run Apple IIgs software on a Linux system.

When I started college at U of M Dearborn in 1990 I instantly fell in love with UNIX and I desperately wanted to run it at home. I had a Macintosh as my main computer at the time but I picked up a cheap IBM 386 from work and started messing around with Linux. Eventually the Mac went away and I settled on Linux. I haven't looked back since.

Interests & Hobbies

As you may have already guessed my primary interest is computers. Primarily I focus on computer programming; hardware tinkering holds some interest for me but I rarely engage in it. Outside of computers main interests include anime, foreign languages (French, German, Japanese and Chinese so far), reading books and watching my favorite TV shows and movies.