(also known as Scott Wegener to the non-internet community)
Click here for a more recent pic.
(also known as Scott Wegener to the non-internet community)
Click here for a more recent pic.
Ok, seeing as you managed to find my web page, I suppose I should tell you who I am.. I'm a 29 year old displaced New Yorker who has somehow managed to wind up in Raleigh, NC for the time being. I enlisted in the US Navy in 1989, and wound up in WA state on board the USS Carl Vinson(CVN-70). After four years of that lovely experience and realizing how many people 'retired' out of the service only to manage a Denny's (yech), I decided that I wanted to go back to school and get my Bachelors in Computer Science if not a MS degree. I originally started programming years before the USN, and had gotten back into it doing some DB3 work for a year or so during my time in the service. After getting out of the USN in May of 1993, I enrolled full-time at Olympic College in Bremerton, WA in their Associate in Technical Arts in Computer Information Systems program, a specialized A.S. degree. After completing my degree there I chose to do my upper level work at The Evergreen State College (TESC) mainly because of their Student Originated Software program, a year long software development program. Unfortunately, it wasn't offered in '94 when I transferred there, so I took Computability and Cognition, an AI program covering math logic, grammars, neural networks, Prolog programming and other forms of self-induced torture. I enrolled in SOS for my last year at TESC and spent the year working in Software Engineering, relational and OOP DB design and implementation, Smalltalk, and several other topics and finished off my studies there over the summer with courses in computer networking and the TCP/IP protocol suite. After graduating, I went on to work as an instructor for Olympic College, after tutoring for them for years. That was a lot of fun, but unfortunately, it was still in WA state, of which I had more than enough of by that time. For those of you that have never visited WA state- DON'T. It has a 10 month rainy season that's pretty miserable, or at least the area I was in did. So, after teaching for a while, I decided it was time to leave the Pacific Northwest, so went in search of work in CA, the southeast US, or outside the continental US, and finally chose to move to Memphis, TN working as a contracted Programmer Analyst for Federal Express on an Electronic Commerce project called VirtualOrder. Great group of people to work with, would go back there again were it not for their not so prime location in Memphis. memphis is actually a pretty fun place to visit; actually, it can be a GREAT place to visit during the spring down on Beale Street, but a less than ideal place to live. Unless of course, you ENJOY racial tension for some reason and don't mind having a bad area of town within 4 blocks from ANYWHERE.
After bidding adieu to FedEx(and some good friends unfortunately), I'd heard all kinds of good things about Raleigh and the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina so thought it was time to check it out. I went to work for a smaller company called Alphatronix, which was a subsidiary of Auspex Systems. If the link to Alphatronix doesn't work, it's because Auspex essentially liquidated us recently. If it DOES work, it's because they don't have anyone at ATX left that understands the network so their web page is still up. But I'm not bitter. :) I then decided to stay for a while in NC and see what happened. So far it seems like a pretty nice place- for the most part, people are capable of speaking English here without a redneck accent, and that's always a plus! That about sums it up except for what I do for fun. Some of that should be obvious from this site. Other than that, I LOVE horseback riding, camping, flying, shooting pool, auctions, and am pretty willing to try almost anything once. Oh yeah, I'm also quite stubborn, thickheaded, and opinionated. If you need an opinion, just ask me and I'll be more than happy to give you one! :)
I first started programming in BASIC (yech) on an TRS-80 Color
Computer back in 1981 at age 12 then 'upgraded' through a VIC-20,
C-64, Atari 800 and finally an Amiga 500 which I paid ~$1400 for
with 512k of RAM before I slowed down on coding for a while. After getting
out of the USN in 1993 and doing some DBase 3+ programming
before my discharge, I got back into programming with a vengeance
and have been loving it. Current major areas of interest include
C/C++, database development, UNIX, X-Windows, system
administration, and Internet development. I am the Registrant and Owner of
mindcore.net, which at this point is little more than a convenience for me, but at
some point will have some useful things added to it IF a local ISP ever gets
their act in gear and offers domain hosting over ADSL or cable modems at a reasonable rate.
Here's some useful links for ya(hopefully):
Linux is a free Unix-like operating system available for the Intel x86 platform with many other platforms in work including the DEC Alpha and the Macintosh. It offers an X windowing system, typical Unix tools and is constantly under development. It was first started by Linus Torvalds when he was a graduate student at Helsinke University. It's a great STABLE platform for servers of any type, and has been getting more and more media and corporate attention recently. I attribute this not only to the fact that Linux is now mature enough to run against the 'big' Unices (Solaris, HP/UX, etc), the price is great(Can you say FREEE? I knew you could!) , but also due to the fact that Microsoft, also referred to as Micro$oft or M$, just doesn't seem capable of making any product that can scale or actually serve as a REAL server platform. OK, not entirely true. There are two products that are OK- M$ Word and Sql Server, but SQL Server was bought from Sybase, and Word becomes more bloated with each release. There has been an ongoing Internet documentation project which now contains a users guide, sysadmin guide and network administration guide. I have been using Linux since before most people heard of it(anyone remember SLS or the .8 and .9 series kernels?), first as a way to become familiar with Un*x and Un*x programming, and now as a part-time hobby/full-time addiction. Plus the fact that I _LIKE_ to have a windowing system that is actually configurable instead of having Windoze or Win 95 conventions forced on me :-) I did an article for Linux Journal back in March- they are a magazine dedicated solely to the Linux OS and a great source of Linux and general UNIX information.
Smalltalk is an OOP language that most people seem to either love or hate. It's an interesting language as it is platform independant but I find the syntax rather cumbersome at times.
Give some people a small title like Vice President of the United
States and they try to get away with murder. Censorship of ANY kind is
bad enough, but of late has been an ongoing debate regarding the
Internet. Boy, wouldn't Al's Mom be proud of him? The following is
a list of web sites dealing with miscellaneous political issues. The
one's pertaining to censorship are mostly STRONGLY against
censorship of the Internet. (Think you can guess my opinion on this
topic?)
The Upyours Congress Page talks about the outrageous
Communications Decency Act and it's breach of our First Amendment rights.
Fun and gamesOk, have to have SOME time for fun and games right? Well, there
are plenty of entertaining items on the net. I have been involved in
programming MUDs for several years now and am one of the
original starting coders for Lua-uhane which
is a Nightmare mudlib based MUD which we have modifed over the
past years to suit our needs and make it a unique place.
Feel free to telnet to Lua.
Myths and Legends is another Nightmare based MUD I've been involved with
that is still under development and not yet open for beta testing but feel free to
look around there or visit
MoonShadow or MoonShadow's WWW page.
I saw this on the net and just had to make a link to it just to show
what some people waste bandwidth on. If any of you actually like
Barney the Dinosaur then enjoy.
Myself, I'd much rather prefer checking out
The Jihad to Destroy Barney the Dinosaur on the Internet page...MUCH better :)
Electronic magazines are growing in popularity of late; I don't think it will be long before more and more major magazines will be offering summaries if not entire copies and archives through the Web. Look for more to be added here as I come across them.
To leave feedback or comments/outdated link reports email:
wegster@bitsmart.com
