Will's blog

I just found writing programs really cool. We started out with a Vector and I started playing Invaders and Deadline. Then I played Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos and King's Quest and Space Quest and the first Microsoft Flight Simulator and Epyx Winter Games and Decathalon and ....

And then I was like, "I wonder how they write stuff like this." And then I discovered this tome we had that we used to keep the printer balanced because it was missing a foot. It was called IBM Basic. And I read it and started writing my own games and stuff. Then I learned QBasic and a bit of basica and then the first version of Visual Basic (which was horrid--ugh) for Windows. I started solving problems with computers and programming.

I used to read magazines on the subject, and various conference papers my dad would bring back from his little trips. I learned about hardware, IRQs, DMAs, and such (becuase you had to know them to get any game working at all). I think my dad was the first reseller of 3Com equipment in the Northeast. I knew lots of folks at my dad's work that were doing the computer thing. Then I hit high school and poked around with hacking games and BBSs. At college, I hit Macintosh and Unix and lived in the computer lab, became a tutor, then ran the computer lab a few years later. I got my MCSE (it wasn't hard). I learned a bazillion languages. I read RFCs, I wrote my own web-server in C, I toyed with MTAs for a bit, I read about IP stacks and network security and firewalls and proxy servers. I learned about compilers and graphics routines and compression algorithms. I slipped on a rock and fell on my ass and accidentally learned HTML while walking home from dinner one day. I learned CGI programming from the NCSA site. I started mudding. I got on a project building our own mud server, driver, and lib. I took over a mud client project called Lyntin and written entirely in Python.

So on so forth.

Course, the other side of the story is this. I had no athletic skills to become an athlete. I dislike biological fluids, so medicine was out of the question. Law irritates me--and many people who practice law irritate me more. Political Science is anything but a science. Chemistry and Math and Physics were really cool--wish I had taken more in college. Art is wonderful, but I disagreed with the professors as to why people do art--though I still draw and paint and such. Music is also wonderful--and I still play a variety of instruments. Great books were trippy--Jesuit professors are amazing folk. Theology was interesting. Philosophy was neat as well. Teaching will be nice some time down the road.

And that's the story. Course, it could have just been symptoms of heavy iron deposits in the water I drank as a kid.