Some times I dislike being the only one in this burg I know. With a passion for computers and coding in my age group...

Sheesh man, I was in diapers with a Tandy 1000 and TRS-80 Colour Computer for toys. WebTV introduced me to the World Wide Web. A Computer donated from our Church showed me Windows 98 and got me doing like 8+ hour a day learning stuff via Earthlink Dialup.

Look at me now? I'll be 19 this June. 3 Computers, desktop, desktop turned server, and laptop. Plus Ma's desktop. Stuck living with Windows often. Yet I breath naturally on my FreeBSD / PC-BSD systems. Feels good to long into FreeBSD even if its through PuTTY at times.

No clue wtfrig I started learning programming, I don't even care much for C++ in retrospect. Yet I love C !!! GO figure. When I get to a working vacation in July. I plan on boning up on Pythons standard library. I'm only very familer at that level with C and some of the BSD / POSIX extensions on my system. Most of which, I rather like...

Learning to do stuff at CLI levels, learning, understanding, and mastering complexity == heaven. Flib it, man I don't even _use_ an _IDE_ as most call it. I started with Dev-C++ now? My little bag of tricks. Vi, Vim, Ex, I can use Emacsen but prefer Visen ;-). GCC, the only compiler I've ever used but I like it so far. Although I wish it'd be better at reminding me that I transposed a , /or . although thats a font and many lines later issue. I've found using GCC from the command line much more flexible. GDB for debugging, skip the GUI ! Lint for simplistic code checking, ctags for larger stuff. A bloody fine manual for system calls, the standard library, and ncurses. A very good Bourne Shell implementation for scripting and many choices. BSD & GNU make, and a number of other things I've yet to learn like groff and automake.

Most people my age? Ask'em what C Programming is and they'd probably say forging report cards ! Most probably wouldn't even know what the HTML in index.html stands for.. A lot of my friends are not even the most computer literate.

I've been told in my youth that my mind was like some one older then my years... But I've always valued my uniqueness. How many lusers do you know. Who'd manufacture their own fscking mother board & write device drivers as necessary for if they only knew how !!!!!!!!!!!!! Ok , so I'm a crazy lune... can't help that. But, GOD, I Love to learn about stuff that gets my interest. He's blessed me so much with being able to learn as much as I have. Odds are, if it wasn't for that one computer Robert gave me. When he heard ma wouldn't let me repartion & dual boot ma's computer. I probably never would have gotten into *nix systems as much as I have. If my sister didn't get me my laptop. I'd probably never been able to learn this much for programming. Its been a great blessing, one that I'm very thankful for. To me, its a joy to learn some thing new and interesting every day. I'd be happy some day, to know as much about computers as Mel Kaye did lol.

Yet still... who do I have to share this passion with? Mm, no one.......

Thats what pains me lately.