Just a page for lil ol' me to jot down my random thoughts and senseless ramblings.
I work as an analyst programmer in a software house specialising in smart card and security systems. We design both the hardware and software components, and have clients ranging from government departments to prisons to international sea-ports. For security reasons I will have to refrain from mentioning the name of the company, but I can tell you that it rhymes with 'ass' ;)
This section is so-named because apart from developing software as a job, I also do a lot of programming as a hobby. I use Visual Basic, primarily, and am partial to Microsoft SQL Server when it comes to databases. I have numerous ongoing projects (some of which unfortunately look like they'll never see the light of day), including a single-player adventure game (in the 'roguelike' vein) and a Windows-based MUD in the leisure department, and a Database Housekeeping Tool and various Visual Basic ActiveX controls in the useful programmer's utilities department. Hopefully I will be able to upload some of the projects soon!
Do you like multi-player, online strategy games? If you do, you will like Utopia. I have been playing it for about two years, and it never gets boring, especially as they keep changing things every new round (a game round is about 3 months or 12 weeks). In Utopia you play as the ruler/leader of a province vying for prominence in a pseudo-medieval, fantasy-type setting. You choose a race (from a list that includes human, elf, dwarf, orc, halfling, and the like), a personality which determines among others whether you are warlike in your approach or instead prefer to delve into the magical arts, and from then on you build your province as part of a twenty-five-province-strong kingdom, waging wars on other kingdoms for power, honour and glory. Here's a snapshot of my 'Throne Page' at the end of an earlier round, in which I managed to end up as the highest-honour Faery in the world (with the rank of Prince!) on one of the three available servers. Here are other snapshots of my 'Affairs of State' page and the world honour charts. I was also the King of my kingdom at that time.
I also play Yahoo! Fantasy Football (and for the Yanks reading this, note that 'football' here refers to soccer, not that rugbyish-but-far-more-boring kind of game that you guys play.. ;)), and my team is called 'Sunderland Forever', named after, as some of you may have already guessed, the great Sunderland Football Club, who are currently languishing in the Coca-Cola League 1 championship but obviously threatening to break into the premiership any time soon (any hint of sarcasm there is purely accidental)
Last Update: 25/09/2004
Last Update: 18/06/2006
