About the Owner

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, 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.

~CC