About the Author

Personal Biography!

I hold dual degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics and reside in Alberta, Canada. My first computer was a Zenith Heathkit (Z-248) in the late 1980’s, however as quite young I really only played Reader Rabbit and the Amiga game 688 Attack Sub. Games such as Wolfenstein, which all my friends were playing, were completely out of the question on this hardware; unfortunately it wouldn’t be until much later, in 1998, I was fortunate enough to get a top of the line Dell workstation running at 600MHz, which was an extreme luxury and made up for some pretty primitive computing over the past decade.

Therein started a deep obsession with Assembly, C and C++; particularly after a close friend introduced myself to Slackware Linux (version 7.0 in 1999, when it still came on professional packaged CD-ROMs). I recall the side of the box mentioning gcc, and including all sorts of other compilers. I thought that pretty odd for an operating system to mention, and drove my curiosity on what the value in that was. So I bought a few books, and started doing the basics and grew from there. I remember how naive I was in being completely fearful I would permanently wreck my Dell dabbling in the unknown!

When I entered University, I went straight for a degree in Mathematics - mainly because it was the only reason I was able to get into post secondary. Arts were definitely not my thing! While I did quite well, computers were now at their apex in terms of technological leaps in short windows of time, and I really wanted to know them intricately. I returned, yet again, and got a Computer Science major to round out my schooling; learning a lot of C, Lisp, Prolog, and Java - of course also algorithms, set theory, etc. Two courses in particular stuck with me really well; they were Computer Hardware I & II which mostly went into Motorola 6800 RISC programming, computer architecture, and VHDL coding on FPGA boards. I was utterly, unquestionably, unequivocally hooked and in deep ever since.

Now I do a lot of designing and assembly myself. Software programming is a bit on the wayside as my focus mostly is on integrated circuits, TTL, flip-flops, ROM chips and all the exciting low-level aspects of computing. However I still get my fill of C with Microchip, and BASIC using AVR’s. I started the blog to share some of my designs and insights, and be a repository for my work, and keep me motivated to keep innovating, and meet some new people with similar aspirations. I still have a lot to learn in this field, I’m never going to know it all - it’s too deep and vast. And, there will be errors, there will be omissions.

~Thanks for visiting!