I’ve now hit 25K. Since there is nothing new past 25K, I had originally planned to spend whatever rep I get beyond that as bounties on people’s questions (like my childhood plan to make $5M, then give away every cent beyond that). However, I’ve become quite dissatisfied with the direction that the SE sites have been going. They are becoming too much like TV.com which I more or less complete withdrew from due to their oppressive fascism and I will probably end up doing the same with the SE sites, perhaps dropping in once in a while to check the inbox—though mostly just to follow up with people to whom I’ve provided existing support.

Press the chemise key to continue… ☺

Programming
“Hobby programmer” (for 22+ years), using lots of languages. Done some graphics and game programming, but more of a “support programmer” (I write libraries, tools, utilities, and smaller single-purpose programs).

Hardware
Somewhat into hardware and electronics. (I prefer software because it’s much cheaper to experiment with and fix.) I’ve designed and built a couple of pieces of hardware (computer peripheral “toys”) and written drivers and software for them.

Security
Very into computer security, in regards to programming and software. Regularly making my way through texts on secure programming and always researching the latest threats and ways to run security software and make configurations to really harden Windows.

Repair
I enjoy fixing computers (particularly software), but I don’t like taking the lazy, easy way—no re-/repair-installs! I prefer to dig in and find a way to fix it instead. I actually repair broken things, I don’t just paint over them.

Teaching
I’m fairly good at understanding what people are trying to say, even if they are bad at communicating it (why I’ve been teaching since eighth grade). I try to read the whole question or comment before responding, but I’m an painfully slow reader, so occasionally I may only read part of a post and end up embarrassing myself. (Once, I posted an agreement to a comment, only to realize that the original comment was my own. Well, it could’ve been worse; I could’ve disagreed with it.)

SE
My accepted-rate is kind of low because I don’t ask a question if I can fix it myself. If I absolutely cannot fix it on my own, I resort to asking others, but the questions I tend to ask are such that others usually have not seen/heard of/thought of/often even considered. As such, there usually are no answers to my questions at the time I ask them.

Avatar
My picture is a logo I created in an icon-editor, based on an emoticon I saw and liked years ago on a now defunct game-server site. The original icon rotated and was low-res, so I made a vecotrized (and static) version at various resolutions and have been using it since at least Nov.14.2002 (yay; 10th anniversary!)