EnwTheGood
09-08-2002, 05:33 PM
Well, I'm Eric N. Winer, a 15-year-old high school junior from a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA, USA, which is one of those towns whose main industry (steel) collapsed in the '70s and has spent the last 30 years struggling to establish itself as a technology center, mostly using the strategy dictating that if they call themselves a technology center, some idiots will believe them. Despite the Pittsburghian's best efforts, though, it's still only ketchup (Heinz) and a few large banks.
Wow, that was random. Back to the point: my dad was one of those people who was like using computers through college and was fascinated by the advent of the microcomputer, and so the house has a great number of working but utterly useless relics. I started programming in 1995 (woah... I was 8 years old) by learning QBasic from a little shop called Kids Computer University run by a friend's mother's friend.
I've tried to learn new things in the seven ensuing years--I now know Basic, C, C++, PHP, SQL, ASP, a bit of MFC, HTML, Java, saxophone, and guitar (they're not programming or markup languages, but they're not easy to learn, either).
I started doing website design a few years ago when I learned about JavaScript and CSS and wanted to explore the possibility of a dynamic-loading page, theoretically the fastest website in the world.
I got an offer to design a website for a little nonprofit organization and culminated my efforts by producing a website which I now store at http://home.adelphia.net/~ewiner/mlfe/indexIE.html (IE, Opera only please). Of course, the main limitations of that site were that I had to put each page of content on one line of a javascript string variable, and I had to update the NS (non-dynamic) copy of the website whenever I changed the main one.
After getting a little fed up (and rather bored) with my experiment, I set out to design a new Mt. Lebanon Foundation for Education website, replete with full usage of my newly acquired PHP and mySQL skills, honed through practice on 4nx2.com, one of the greatest websites ever to exist. The results of that are at http://www.mlfe.org/. Actually, the base of that site was taken from a site I made once called the MCO Mafia, a little clan of Motor City Online beta testers who unanimously decided to disband once we all realized that the full game would be $10 a month. There were at least 4 mirrors of that site at one time, and not one of them still exists (or maybe I just can't find them).
My latest project was to build my own computer, which finally works well after 2 months of returns, tech support, and exploding power supplies (not a pretty sight).
I've always wanted to open up a website dedicated to Small Form Factor PCs (a rapidly growing segment of the computer market). I also want to pioneer my idea of an open-post site, where anyone can post news or reviews onto the main page with a quick moderator check. I think it make the people more active in the website, and maybe offset the miniscule amount of updating that one webmaster can do in his free time.
Asleep yet?
Wow, that was random. Back to the point: my dad was one of those people who was like using computers through college and was fascinated by the advent of the microcomputer, and so the house has a great number of working but utterly useless relics. I started programming in 1995 (woah... I was 8 years old) by learning QBasic from a little shop called Kids Computer University run by a friend's mother's friend.
I've tried to learn new things in the seven ensuing years--I now know Basic, C, C++, PHP, SQL, ASP, a bit of MFC, HTML, Java, saxophone, and guitar (they're not programming or markup languages, but they're not easy to learn, either).
I started doing website design a few years ago when I learned about JavaScript and CSS and wanted to explore the possibility of a dynamic-loading page, theoretically the fastest website in the world.
I got an offer to design a website for a little nonprofit organization and culminated my efforts by producing a website which I now store at http://home.adelphia.net/~ewiner/mlfe/indexIE.html (IE, Opera only please). Of course, the main limitations of that site were that I had to put each page of content on one line of a javascript string variable, and I had to update the NS (non-dynamic) copy of the website whenever I changed the main one.
After getting a little fed up (and rather bored) with my experiment, I set out to design a new Mt. Lebanon Foundation for Education website, replete with full usage of my newly acquired PHP and mySQL skills, honed through practice on 4nx2.com, one of the greatest websites ever to exist. The results of that are at http://www.mlfe.org/. Actually, the base of that site was taken from a site I made once called the MCO Mafia, a little clan of Motor City Online beta testers who unanimously decided to disband once we all realized that the full game would be $10 a month. There were at least 4 mirrors of that site at one time, and not one of them still exists (or maybe I just can't find them).
My latest project was to build my own computer, which finally works well after 2 months of returns, tech support, and exploding power supplies (not a pretty sight).
I've always wanted to open up a website dedicated to Small Form Factor PCs (a rapidly growing segment of the computer market). I also want to pioneer my idea of an open-post site, where anyone can post news or reviews onto the main page with a quick moderator check. I think it make the people more active in the website, and maybe offset the miniscule amount of updating that one webmaster can do in his free time.
Asleep yet?