Know your fellow programmers : New Faces

Hey John, my name is "Lamb in a Stormtrooper Suit"... as in "lamb" as in... uh... small sheep. That's a stuffed lamb in the picture, not a poodle.

And regarding the photographic industry, I don't want to bore anyone or myself with a list of all the reasons why I decided to move on. Let's just say that it's just so not the glamorous career that most people think it is. Well, like most supposedly "glamorous" careers... they only look that way from the outside. It's also a cut-throat industry, relatively shallow, and is extremely male dominated... after working as an assistant for years and putting up with photographers hitting on me all the time, I eventually started up on my own and then spent seven or eight years putting up with art directors hitting on me all the time. Pretty infuriating when people are more interested in looking at your butt than your portfolio. That said, I'm already starting to yawn so will move on to something more interesting.

Frogs with spats ~ do you not know the one I mean? "Hello my baby, hello my darlin'..."

Yeah, it sounds like a pretty sleazy industry when you say it like that. Creeps are so annoying and I can imagine how you might get sick of it! You ought to follow my solution and just not be attractive. It works really well for me, I never get hit on A good friend of mine is a photographer in Canada! But to be honest, he's probably more likely to hit on you then share your pain :blushing:

How stupid do I feel!! Lamb in a ... OF COURSE! Ridiculous. Don't know What I thought 'Lambina' was, sounded like some kind of sugary alcoholic bevarage or perhaps I thought it was your exotic real name. I just don't know. Perhaps I thought it was the name of your 'poodle'. But yeah, do I feel stupid, haha!

I do know the frogs you mean, though my memory isn't so good so what I do remember, my memory is turning in to something a little creepy and eery :ohdear:

Nah, the frog was on a Bugs Bunny episode... a construction worker finds a frog and, while no one but the construction guy is looking, the frog whips out a top-hat and cane and starts singing Broadway tunes and dancing. Construction dude thinks he's hit it rich, puts the frog in his lunch pail, and races off to some Hollywood execs. But in front of anyone else, the frog will only sit there like a regular frog and "ribbit". But back at construction dude's home, the frog won't stop singing and dancing. The guy ends up losing his mind. Anyways, that's the frog. He cracks me up.

He sounds sadistic! Hilarious but sadistic. I actually really want to see that now!!

But he's one lucky frog not to have been born in France. I get the feeling the Construction worker would have got hungry before he went mad!

Ribbit

Here you go! One dancing frog!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saU-Bl0feSs&NR=1

You found the actual cartoon! Amazing!!

Alas, I am at work right now, but I finish in a mere 2 hours and I assure you, it's high on my to-do list

The frog could have come with me. I'm going to the Theatre next Tuesday to see something called 'The Spirit of Broadway' with my other half. Very exciting!!

so i saw this one in the new / active forum topics there

im a 22 yr old from Pittsburgh PA ( WHOOP WHOOP!)

im a student at The university of Pittsburgh

I drink/smoke/rave/waste time too much

I've been designing since i was 12

oh yeah and i have a habit of crashing cars - so i ride the bus

and yes its a short one.

so i saw this one in the new / active forum topics there

im a 22 yr old from Pittsburgh PA ( WHOOP WHOOP!)

im a student at The university of Pittsburgh

I drink/smoke/rave/waste time too much

I've been designing since i was 12

oh yeah and i have a habit of crashing cars - so i ride the bus

and yes its a short one.

I'm a busser myself! Can't get caught drink-driving if you can't drive! And as long as it's not illegal to drink and 'ride', I'll be bussing it and train-ing it for a while to come!

I just finished Uni but fortunately that didn't spell the end of the good times. Last night the misses and I were walking through town and she used to work in KFC with this dude who is now a doorman to a strip club. Sure enough he lets us both in for free and next thing I know I'm sat there staring so intently at my beer you'd think it contained the meaning of life, just as not to look up and risk getting told off for looking

Haha!

SO what do you study?

Hi everyone. I'm Neil Cauldwell - 23 years old and a recent graduate currently based in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I like designing new concepts for social web apps, and do so using CSS + XHTML, with the intention getting a project up & running. I started coding at the beginning of 2007 (so still a complete newbie), and I think it's all ace!

Nice to meet you Neil! Where did you graduate from then? And what in? I'm guessing it wasn't a techy degree ("I started coding at the beginning of 2007")?

Glad your enjoying it though!! Coding is fun when you get in to it, though at the moment in my current employment it involves a lot of documentation before the good stuff. Still, can't wait to show them my skills (I'm fairly new here).

John

Wow what an active thread! Great idea, but now is anyone going to do anything else?

So for what it's worth, my name is John (if you can't tell by my username) and I'll be 44 in 11 days, and now I'm feeling older after reading how young most of you are. I have 3 kids, a daughter 20 that's getting married next year (which makes me feel even older), another daughter that turns 17 on Aug 11th and will be a senior in high school. I now have a 3 year old son as well, Isaac, who is absolutely incredible. He can already use a computer by himself on a limited basis. He's smarter than most adults I know (which might say something about my friends?). I have a beautiful wife (Wendy) who's also my best friend.

I think of myself as a software developer more than anything else. In the late 80's - mid 90's, I owned a commercial printing company and that got me into computers (MAC for graphics and pre-press production). I work for myself mostly, but do enough work for others to pay the bills. For the last 8-years I've built a trading platform for the financial markets called MarketCAST.

One of the unintended consequences of developing MarketCAST was becoming a web developer. I lead a 3-man dev team and we all work from home offices, but mostly from my home office in Spring Hill (Tampa area), Florida. I have a great home office setup that includes a rack of servers, 4 multi-screen developer workstations, one 8-screen trading workstation, loads of bandwith, backup power, and etc.

It's funny how projects are born. For example, in order to manage our development work online, we built a project management system. To better manage and view our documentation, we built a custom wiki. And of course, in the process of doing anything over the years, we've built many web sites.

I am a total open-source believer, an MS hater, and I run Linux (Debian on the servers and now Abuntu on the desktops). I'm an anti-diplomat and can't stand political correctness of any kind, which is why I have to work for myself. Despite all that, I do like people and animals even more. I never could understand why some people spend half their life playing video games. When I'm not working, I'd rather be outside or doing anything besides being on a computer.

Well, great job on this forum,a nd this thread. I'll shut up now.

Thanks JohnM,

This thread is my little puppy, because I found the lack of something similar on this forum a little disappointing. This forum certainly has its regulars, and its nice to know who your talking too sometimes.

It's really nice to hear about your wife being your best friend also. I'm currently with a girl I've been best friends with for 5 years so I know it's incredible to have that 'all-in-one' package. And good luck with Isaac... mini-genious in your household?

You have an impressive sounding home office! Having said that with the development you've done that's probably a requirement. No wonder Isaac is getting to grips with computers already though, when I was a kid my Dads PC seemed like the most scary complex thing in the world. If Isaac was familiar with how your office looked, a single PC would seem rather undaunting and simple...

Talking of PC, what do you mean by "anti-diplomat"? I don't believe I've heard the term before,

Thanks for adding to this thread,

John

Hi John,

Oh it's just a term I use to describe myself sometimes. Basically it says that I could (or should) be more diplomatic. You know how some people have the ability to always say things in a diplomatic way, and others (like me) tend to cut to the chase and simply say what's on their mind.

Has she been your 'girlfriend' for 5-years or just friend, and now only recently she's your girlfriend? If it's the former, you ought to marry that girl, assuming she is the love of your life. The good ones always get snatched up, and as the old saying goes, if you snooze... you loose!

When I was a kid, there wasn't PC's. My dad still had a black & white TV. Now I really feel old!

BTW, we just had a lady from London move in with us a couple weeks ago. She just married my best friend from school and he's going to work in the middle east for two-years and so she's going to stay with us while he's gone. I'm learning a lot about how things are in London and England these days. I lived in Europe for 2-years between 1980-82, and things have certainly changed dramatically since then. We're having very interesting conversations.

On another side note, look for a post from me on the layouts forum later. I've got what I think to be a nice 2-col elastic layout that I'm working on to use as a template and I want to get some feedback from people here on my CSS. I'm getting so many requests to do websites that I'm thinking if I can create a number of site templates to use, I might take on one or two of those projects for certain easy-to-work-with clients.

Have a great Day!

Good plan John, I will indeed look out for that post!

I first met the girl I'm currently with 5 years ago when she was living with my first girlfriend. Me and my first girlfriend split up and though my current misses had a boyfriend she confessed she had loved me pretty much since the moment she had met me. However, she was a 'fun-loving' girl and though she couldn't refrain from cheating on her boyfriend with multiple people, she didn't ever want to cheat on me. Consequently, she figured she didn't want to actually be with me until she could trust herself and sure enough, we remained best friends however hurtful for the both of us that might have been (not wanting to seem weak, I continued dating also) until early this year we decided we were ready and have been a couple since. It has been a rough 4 years as we've watched one another with other people and tried to ignore the feelings for one another, but it was worth it because we've ended being able to completely trust one another.

England is a strange place at the moment. My girlfriend phoned me on my way to work this morning... "John, the world has gone crazy... its in the news as we speak that there is now a 'Tony Blair Musical'"!!!

The world has gone crazy. Next thing you know there will be the Bush-Blair Bananza!

BTW, I posted that layout. Now I'm off to meetings!

Have a great Day!

I think I'm going to join in as well.

I'm Arielle, a 30-year-old GUY from the Philippines.

For two years now, I've been working inside my room (in my mother's house) as a freelance web designer. Sometimes I get small graphic design/print projects from my sisters, who are both writers.

I have a girlfriend. Her name is Inez. Last Sunday, she left for Indiana to pursue a PhD in Science Communication in Purdue University. We'll be apart for the next four years but plan on getting married upon her return. "Informally engaged" is what we call our situation.

Indiana and the Philippines are on opposing timezones. So in order for Inez and I to speak to each other, I'd have to be up at 5pm here to 9am the next day-- which basically makes me a vampire.

Like all vampires, I have a "hound of hell". His name is Hubbah, a 7-month old brown Labrador. I feed him rice, liver, crushed egg shells and a mix of vegetables every morning; and bathe him every two or three days.

And to reply to John, I too have enjoyed watching from a black-and-white television set as up until the late 80's, they were still widely used (and popular) here.

Welcome back ABCruz, haven't seen you around in a while?

^I've been really busy. Not to mention tired.

Wow! He's got it good. Does he really need to be washed that often? Our vet told us you only need to wash dogs when they smell which can vary from dog to dog.

^We have a very warm climate here. And I think Hubbah really enjoys his baths, it's how we have fun too. But since the start of the rainy season, I only bathe him once weekly.

Must be nice to have a rainy season - we're on level 5 water restrictions here.

It's extremes up here. During the dry season it becomes really hot and the water supply becomes very low. I remember last April, we peaked at 40 C. Almost every night, there were fire trucks racing near where I live.

But during the rainy season, there's lots of flooding. Just last week we experienced around four days of continuous rain and some ten people died because of landslides. Lots of farmland too were destroyed.

During Christmas though, things get more decent.

Welcome ABCruz, thanks for contributing to my thread!

What sort of stuff do your sisters write?

Weather wise we're having extremes here too at the moment, but one day in, one day out! England has spent a lot of time under water this summer with lots of places being really badly flooded. Meanwhile, out comes the sun and this is what happens!!

(This photo was taken 2 days ago, 2 minutes from my house)! It's as if we lived in a tropical country...

Hey, thanks!

Mostly the write technical stuff. The older one, she works with our national police force. She "converts" statistical stuff into something that regular people will understand. The other one is more into the creative side of writing, although both my sisters work together most of the time.

England! I hear nice stories about England from my friends who've had the chance to visit your country. But it's mostly about football and the pub scene that goes with it.

It's great that you live very near the beach, by the way. Where I live isn't so far from the sea too, but it isn't a nice place to go to. Hahaha!

Yeah, I love living near the beach, not that I ever go there. Your right though, a lot of people are quite obsessed with Football over here! I'm afraid I never got in to all of that, but I'm more then familiar with the pub scene, haha!

We often have friends come to stay (I've had Russian, Danish, French, Swedish and Swiss girls staying with me in the last couple of years), and they are all surprised how much some of us drink over here!

I was thinking of taking another picture later today for the forum, just to show the difference between how things look today compared to a couple of days ago. We have miserable weather today and have been told to expect floods in the next couple of days

Response to question in different thread :

Brief life story

Born in Guildford, but lived in Haslemere for 2 years. Then moved to Slough until the age of 10. Not being enough of an industrial town for us, we then relocated to Wigan. A southern accent in a northern school didn't go down to well and when I turned 16 I left for school in South Wales. However, that does mean I effectively grew up (High School) in Wigan and my parents still live there.

Consequently, I am going back with my FIRST EVER guest to Wigan (my girlfriend) for my FIRST NIGHT OUT up there in over 8 years this Saturday. It's a scary prospect but an exciting one, and I am actually meeting school friends I haven't seen since the days of school. I can hear the cheery voiced advertisement now...

"I got beaten up and ended my short trip home in intensive care. Thanks friendsreunited.co.uk, without you they would never have found me"!

Yeah yeah but did you ever go to the Wiggen Casino? or are you not a Northen Soul boy?

Your not going to like this answer!

It closed 2 years before I was born....

:? no it can't have been, can it :? ooh er am I in one of those time warps, I was sure that it went on well into the eighties, Time is cruel, I don't like Time, I curse the person that invented it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigan_Casino

Sorry H

If it's any consolation, I would have liked to have danced to the Northern Soul, but it wasn't to be.

Now all Wigan has is Wigan Pier, oh and a bunch of sports teams doing quite well...

So Hugo truly is the Big Brother around here! :rolleyes:

I'd go with that!

Hugo, there's this lad at school and he keeps taking my dinner money... can you go sort him out please?

I joke about being a kid, but I went to see the Disney Stage version of the musical Beauty and the Beast last night!!!

Helllooo! I'm a Web Developer in Seattle, Washington, USA. So, please forgive me for spelling color the wrong way.

I currently work mainly with X/HTML, JavaScript and PHP, and I'm beginning to get the hang of the CSS thing, too. I used to work with SQL and even Oracle.

As for fun, I enjoy fancy chocolates, my Wii, and reading science fiction.

Hello Katie, nice of you to leave a message.

I used to read a lot of science fiction/fantasy myself, but I haven't found the time to do some reading in the last few years. If I were to pick myself up a new book, what would you recommend?

Arielle

If I were to pick myself up a new book, what would you recommend?

Arielle

I always recommend anything by Spider Robinson or Neil Gaiman; I envy people who have not yet read their books. It's not new, but this summer I read The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester for the first time, and I highly recommend it. The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold was also fantastic.

Good luck to you, Arielle

^ Gaiman! I was an avid reader of Sandman when I was in college. I'll try to see if Alfred Bester is available in a local bookstore. Thanks for the advice.

Hello Katie,

Nice of you to leave a message. My natural reaction was to welcome you to the forum but fortunately common sense kicked in so I checked to discover you've been here MUCH longer then I have.

Seattle huh? I am a big fan of Frasier oddly enough so would like to see Seattle someday. Having said that, there's a LOT of places I'd like to see someday, haha!

I like the Sci-Fi comedy area I think. I like Tom Holt and Douglas Adams cracks me up. And I think my house is expecting a Wii to be delivered next week (my flatmate got one free with his new mobile phone contract), so I'll be out looking to buy the Zelda game in no time at all

John

I'd rather have a 360 than a wii, but saying that I'd rather have a DS than a PSP

Hmmm, I'm afraid I've always been a loyal Nintendoid. Don't know why. At the moment, I'm up for buying the Wii if only to try out the Zelda game!!

Thanks for the welcome. Yes, I signed up a while ago, got a question answered, and then didn't understand much of anything else that was being asked. So I learned some things and now I'm hanging around again.

As it happens, I'm reading Tom Holt's My Hero right now. That and Who's Afraid of Beowulf were just published in a compilation a few years ago here in the States. Beowulf was hilarious - it's been a very long time since I've chuckled so much on the bus.

I've got both a Wii and a Xbox 360 at home. I prefer the Wii (I've been playing mostly SNES era Virtual Console games lately.) But I've logged quite a few hours playing Settlers of Catan on the 360.

You shall have to tell me what you think of 'My Hero', as I haven't read it!

I can't wait to get a Wii. Ooooh, isn't there a new Mario Kart game planned? I've played the Mario Kart 2 arcade games and if it's something like them, they seem fun!! Plus, I'll have to buy one of those steering wheel adaptions...

Open to All : Do you think Nintendo might take back the lead in the Entertainment console market then with the Wii and DS?

Haven't they already?

They're targeting different markets so you can't really say who is in the "lead", per se.

As for PS3 versus Xbox, I'd have to say in my opinion MS have the upper hand

Go Wii! I can't wait to get in to Zelda (not like that ).

I've never played any of the others... Oh, I tell a lie, I played Halo and used to enjoy that. Plus there was a game called Def Jam I think which i quite liked, and who can pretend not to enjoy the Grand Theft Auto games!!!

P.S. It's a frustrating industry we're in huh. Last night I got my new site I'm playing with working in both IE7 and Firefox (which took a while because the centering technique I was using worked in one but not the other, then I found out my footer padding was working in one and not the other etc etc), only to discover something is wrong with the floats in IE6. I read a lot of threads on here but nothing beats the frustration of doing it yourself

Oh my! Now I'm the one who's feeling old. The last console I had was a PS1 and before that, a Nintendo Family Computer (or was it a SEGA Genesis...)! Hahahaha!

if your asking .. i am a 33 year old stone mason who has been writing code since the days of BASIC 1.0

Set out to be a computer programmer, forced into the building trade as a boy, but managed to push my way out after a 5 year apprenticeship as a stone mason and back to the PC screen in the early 20's of my life.. now im a *beep* hot web site designer and top ranked and rated in my City of Dundee in Scotland!!

Granted the mods in here may *beep* me for using the transitional DOC type but here if i can write great code including PHP MySQL HTML XHTML and of course CSS come up with and original designs then im happy and so are my customers/clients

any ways thats my story .. he he

Good story!

Thanks for that Barry... always good to know who knows what so we can deligate newbies who need help to people with the relevant skillset

Do you know, I've lived in England all my life and never been to Scotland! How bad is that... So how do you get voted "top ranked and rated in my City of Dundee"?

J

Well, I only really come on here when I need help, which is getting much less frequent now. But anyway, my name is Josh, I am a 14 year old Queenslander. I am in week 6 of a 9 week web design cours (entailing Dreamweaver and Flash) so my knowledge of HTML and CSS have skyrocketed since I first joined I am a programmer by heart, and know Visual Basic, C++, C#, Logo and VB.net. I am a very quick learner and like to teach myself things rather then listen in school......

So ummm......yeah, I also tend to drag on a bit in introductions.

BP