About Me

About me.. hmm.. Well I guess you could say I'm a semi-hard-core gamer but I get work done too. I probably average about 15-20 hours of games per week during the school year and over the summer I think I was getting around 50+ hours per week. I don't do consoles, I'm solely a PC gamer, I'm currently running a Compaq I bought with my 'summer savings' running an AMD Athlon Dual-Core 7550 at 2.5GHz+, with 3GB RAM, a 320GB hard drive and my favorite part: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT!

I'm a hard-core Windows boy, I've always used Windows but recently I've considered switching over to Ubuntu. I started out on an old Compaq (need I remind you, my laptop is ALSO a Compaq.. Not that they are my favorite, just what I can afford) running Windows 3.1, playing whatever games I could find at the time, and learning QBasic. To keep on track with the current subject, Windows, I later did some things with Windows 95 and then later, Windows 2000, and soon enough I was on Windows XP which is when my history really picks up. I had somehow got an old junk machine with Windows 98 and I got this baby to run Windows XP (with 128MB RAM and a <1GHz pentium 3 processor) but I never used that as much. My first GOOD computer was my Compaq laptop which I got in 2008, and it came with Windows Vista. I installed Windows 7 on it in January right after the public beta was released. From there I've always used Windows 7, the Beta, the RC, and now I'm running an RTM version I got from my school :D That concludes my Windows history.

I've been interested in programming for almost as long as I've been into computers, but I've never really kicked off the ground with it unfortunately. I started going through a QBasic book my dad gave me a long time ago and I found something online called DarkBASIC which is made specifically for creating games. This interested me a lot but I was always hindered by the computer's onboard Intel graphics chipsets... Then I got addicted to a game for 3 years . . . Then I got back into programming and started learning C++. By this time I had worked at WaterWorld for a whole summer and bought a nice laptop with the money I made. I had gone about half way through a C++ book before I lost interest to something else: XNA Game Studio. This is Microsoft's game studio for creating PC, Xbox 360 and Zune games. I pretty quickly picked up on C# by going through the book, Head First C# and got to making a project in XNA. Then the summer came and I worked at WaterWorld and also got interested in World of Warcraft. . . And then the school year came and I'm back :)

This semester (Fall 2009) I'm taking two extra classes at Red Rocks Community College, college algebra and computer science I: C++. Both are pretty much review of stuff I already knew unfortunately, but I am definitely gaining knowlege of the college environment and making friends. By this point I've started practicing C++ again obviously, and along with the class at Red Rocks, I'm casually going through the book, C++ Primer.

My typical week consists of 2 days of Hope, 2 days of Red Rocks and then Friday and Saturday to work on homework half the time and just do whatever the other half of the time. In this case, whatever being: Playing WoW, or maybe Unreal Tournament 3, working on teaching myself some C++, playing with random things on my computer (8 hours of fiddling with random things and reading random articles could save you 8 hours of waiting for the damn slow computer in the next 2 years...) . . . (Although most of the time it's the last two hours that benefit you... the first 2 hours you screw your system up and then the next 4 hours you fix it.. then the last 2 hours you make it even better) Then Sunday is my day to either sit back and relax, maybe enjoy a movie or something... or my day to frantically work on all the homework I've neglected the rest of the week!