What work do I do? What hobbies do I have that require more than just one- or two-word descriptions? Well, that's a hard one to answer, but I'll do my best.

For starters, I'm a business intelligence developer, soon-to-be high-school teacher, trained programmer, computer technician, software support specialist, and that's where it should end, but doesn't. I can (but prefer not to) read at 1000 words a minute, I can write (see Writing), I have been known to edit college newspapers, content for my current employer, and so on. I have a musical ear, but it's a bit difficult to play the piano with my earlobe, and lots of other stuff!

a bit of history

My first hands-on experience with computers was at the age of 8 or 9, and it was on a console system called "CreatiVision". Aside from the really cool 8-bit cartridge games, there was one cartridge called BASIC. The console had a full keyboard PLUS a cassette deck, where you could save and run your BASIC programs. My father had a programmer friend who wrote a few lines of code and saved it to a cassette, and I picked up a lot from that single program. PEEK and POKE aside (so much homo-erotic syntax has found its way into the IT world), it was fun.

In 1986 (Grade Four), I moved schools and discovered the computer centre. My natural curiosity for blinking lights, flashing screens and that infernal Logo Turtle had me hooked, and three weeks into the year I was the teacher's assistant. It went downhill from there.

In high school (Grade Eight), we were allowed to choose a seventh subject to go with the compulsory six that we needed to pass Matric. So that's where I got started on GW-BASIC and Turbo Pascal. For the record, I hate Pascal. I detest it. I refuse to have anything to do with it, and that goes for Delphi too. I'm a BASIC man, and you can take that how you please. Fortunately, in recent months, my love for C# has overtaken that of VB.

My father bought a computer in 1991 (I was then in Grade Nine), a 286 running at 15MHz, with 1664KB RAM and a 177MB hard drive. He got MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0 with it, and as everyone knows, that was the beginning of Microsoft's huge success, and I rode it from the start.

In 1994, the PC was upgraded to a 486 DX2-66, with 8MB RAM and a 500MB hard drive. We got rid of the 1.2MB floppy drive, kept the 1.44MB stiffy drive, and bought a 2X CD-ROM drive with sound card. Then, in 1995, towards the end of August, Windows 95 was released. I bought it the day after, and became engrossed in it. I acquired Microsoft Office for Windows 95, and became somewhat of an expert in MS Word 2.0 / 95, as it was the tool we used to produce the college newspaper for that year.

The PC was upgraded in 1996 to a Pentium 133MHz with 32MB RAM, a 1GB hard drive and a 8X CD-ROM. For comparative purposes, this was almost a 1000% performance increase over the first PC, and we still used the same tower! I eventually sold this PC in 1999 when I was forced to upgrade to a Celeron 400MHz with 64MB RAM, a 4GB hard drive, scanner, and so on. I left this PC behind when I moved out of home, and only recently (2002) acquired a suitably quick AMD Athlon 900MHz with all the bells and whistles.

2004 brought on the Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Prescott CPU, which allowed me to finally become only minorly obsolete. The AMD has been reduced to an IPCop firewall running version 1.4 stable. The P4 has 1GB RAM, 1 x 120GB EIDE and 1 x 80GB SATA HDD, a BenQ 4X DVD-RW/+RW and Samsung 40X CD-RW. The graphics card leaves a lot to be desired, but I am saving up for the new Nvidia. My notebook, purchased in Feb 2004, is a 17" wide screen P4 2.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD (with an external 60GB USB HDD), DVD-ROM, CD-RW, firewire, ATI 9600 with 128MB, etc., etc.

I will shortly be acquiring Windows Vista. I'm as scared as I should be.

My experience over the past 18 years has allowed me to absorb and understand new technology, software and hardware, to the extent that I am good at what I do, but I don't want to make it my work.

software support

Software support is an interesting place to start. I did the equivalent of the A+ and MOUS (MCOU) coursework, with a bit extra on the side. This was all covered by my Diploma in Software Support in 1997 (from Damelin Computer School). I then did the unthinkable and followed it up with the popular MCSE in 1998. I chose not to write the Windows 2000 upgrade, as I am certainly not planning to make a career out of installing Microsoft Windows :-). Then again, I might pursue the Windows Server 2003 certification.

Unfortunately, though, I was discovered as having hidden talents at each of my employers, so now I have a reputation of being able to troubleshoot a lot of operating systems and applications, trained or not (see History).

programming

BASIC, Q-BASIC, GW-BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, C++, Java, C#. I've done them all, and I love Visual Basic C# the most. Say what you like about Microsoft, but C# is what Java should have been.

At the end of 1998, I did something they called "Advanced Visual Basic", which was a proper Microsoft course. The place where I did my MCSE offered a 50% discount on the course, so I took it. Five days later, I had a pretty yellow file and a piece of paper telling me something I already knew. So I decided to undertake the real challenge of writing a program I would need, rather than relying on what I consider really dodgy examples from said yellow file.

The result was a very small application which started out as "how do we force computers to log off after hours so that the login scripts will run every day?". ShutOff 2000 was the name of this beast, which evolved into a program that can log off or shut down your computer in a number of ways. Over 50 000 people have downloaded it, and after dropping the price to $5, I would anticipate that more people will be willing to pay for it.

I was wrong.

ShutOff 2007, the new enterprise-ready version of this tool, is due for release in, surprise, 2007. It will cost a little more than $5.00 per licence. It is not written in Visual Basic.

career

Up until June 2003, I had a day job. After being retrenched twice by the same company in three months (!), I've decided to take a more serious look at being an entrepreneur. For starters, I own and run my own company, but it is still new, and cannot support my standard of living. After an interesting time with my ex, I have no house, my car is paid off, but I have a partner, and expensive taste, so the income needs to increase substantially in a very short time. I'm working on some ideas, but let's see what happens.

That was in 2004.

Right now, I've met someone new (at the end of 2005), I'm in the second year of my four-year teaching degree, for Senior and FET Phase through UNISA. I am working in one of the top four banks in South Africa, doing business intelligence development. This is a fancy way of saying we do management information systems and reports. One of our tables has over a billion rows of data in it. We like to think we know what we're doing.

future

I don't know, but I have a pretty good idea. My company was growing too slowly, so I merged with a friend of mine and went back to a day job. Like I keep saying, I don't want to do IT for the rest of my life. I want to publish a book or three. I want to become a radio personality. I want to become an actor even. I also want to work smarter, to make the millions that comes from a good idea that is raised effectively. I also want to find out how the universe works.

Until then, I'll become a school teacher.