 Nickname: Dougal
Real Name: Ernest
Age: 0x26
Resides: Canton, Georgia
Occupation: Software Developer
Favourite websites: BoingBoing.net, WilWheaton.net, Possum Blog
Favourite game of all time: Gorf. "HA HA HA! GAME OVER SPACE CADET"
What are you working on right now: Dayjob: Web portals for the hospitality industry. Other: WordPress, general anti-spam measures
What is your current Wallpaper/Screensaver: The "Electric Sheep" animated fractal flame screensaver. Rox0r.
How many pieces of vendorware do you own: Several. Adobe Photoshop gets the most use, though.
What's so special about your computer room: My laptop is named "MyPrecious".
How many computers do you have: My primary machine is a Sony VAIO laptop. I've got a 1.2GHz Athlon XP-2000 desktop collecting dust at home. And there's my dual-proc Pentium-Pro box down in the basement. I'm not sure what the configuration of my wife's current box is. I'm hoping that one day I can
canabalize enough parts to build a DVR.
What was your first computer: A Radio Shack PC-1 "Pocket Computer". It was basically a scientific calculator that you could program in BASIC. It had 1K of memory, and that's what I first learned programming on. Later, my parents got me a Radio Shack Color Computer, with 16K of RAM and "Extended Color BASIC".
It rocked my world. I eventually upgraded it to 64K of RAM (required soldering a wire from one of the DRAM module pints to a jumper on the mother board). I also learned 6809 assembly language and C on that machine. I even wrote my own Run-Length Encoding graphics compression program in assembly. Ah, those were the days!
Do you remember the first program you ran on it: The machine's Internal BASIC interpreter :)
Geekiest moment of your life: Buying a learning remote that I planned to use to hack the QZar laser tag game that my friends and I used to go play.
When did you first realize you were a geek: The first time I saw somebody playing "Haunted House" on a TRS-80 Model 1 computer. (Top Geek: I loved that game!)
If I was a program I'd be: /usr/games/fortune
Favourite quote: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure" (Ripley, "Aliens"). I often quote this when talking about servers.
What do you do when you're not at your computer(s): Spend time with my wife and kids. Kids are *way* harder to program than computers are.
You have a time machine that can only be used once. If you use it you won't come back. What date would you set it to, and what ONE thing would you take with you (not a computer): I'll get back to you on that one after I do some research on the stock market...
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The Truth Behind The Geek (*creative liberties taken for the benefit of the reading audience)
Ernest, who posts articles on his blog, geek ramblings (http://dougal.gunters.org/), tends to tend to be pretty good at "gluing" disparate software systems together. Ernest claims that he has a poor short-term memory but a great recall for useless trivia...which might explain why his wife is able to ask him to name the capital of Bolivia every morning.
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