Bremsstrahlung

Ah! That feels much better. I now have 'first' and 'newest' navigation links, and a smart sidebar with collapsible categories. That seems like about everything I had wanted this place to have, so now that I'm comfortable, I'd like to say a few words about who I am.

I am a college student, studying Physics, and now in my senior undergraduate year. Although I'm passionate about Physics, I also love to tinker with computer software as a hobby. I got started programming the summer before my junior year of highschool using Borland Turbo C++ 2 on my old maybe-pentium Windows 98 computer system. That continued for about three years until my family gave me a beautiful G4 Powerbook as a graduation present and tool for college work. My immediate family has always favored Macintoshes, but I'd previously had old Windows boxes assembled by my grandfather, who likes tinkering with hardware. my freshman year of college I took introductory computer science for fun and learned Java, using Eclipse, which I still loath. Shortly after that I began to realize that Apple supplied XCode and that it could do so many wonderful things that Eclipse could not or did excruciatingly slowly. Since then I'm been teaching myself Cocoa and Carbon and writing programs almost every spare minute. I will admit that I often don't finish what I start, so most of them sit around almost done, but I love creating things which function and do something, which can be done so easily with software, compared the the effort and materials required for, say, wood or metal working.

Around the same time that I began programming (half a year earlier, I think) a friend of mine began describing an exciting game demo that he'd found on that month's MacAddict CD. It was called Avernum 2. About a week later I tried the demo myself and was seriously sucked in. The Avernum trilogy is, in my opinion, brilliant, and many fans agree that the Avernum 2 demo is the high point of the series. Shortly after I worked through Avernum 2, Avernum 3 came out, and it was just as fantastic; it's slightly less vivid feeling offset by a vast and differently beautiful world. After playing that, the friend who had introduced the game to me and I spent hour discussing what we would create if given the tools to make our own games in the Avernum setting. Then eventually (as anyone who knew, as I did not really, that the Avernum series was a remake of the Exile series expected) Blades of Avernum was released, giving fans just that power. I've been hooked ever since, not only on designing scenarios for BoA, but also creating helpful software tools to make such designing easier. I've found it to be a great way to direct creative activity for fun, and I don't think I'd give it up for anything.

So that mostly sums up who I am, in particular, the projection of me that is to be found on the computer and on the internet, which is about what I set out to detail, even if I didn't say so. If this post works an none of my hacked together log system breaks, I'm going to be content, verging on ecstatic, and call it a night.