Long-time Lurker Introduction

[asciimov]

Howdy,

My name is Jesse. I have been a lurking around here since 2003 and I have enjoyed Shane's productions since at least 2002. After the MW front page redesign saying to not be a lurker, as well as a PSR a few episodes back, I thought it was time to stop being a wallflower, join the conversation, and say hello to everybody.

So in brief, I am: in the nintendo and xbox camps, refusing to own sony products due to lack of having a single sony product last more than 6 months (aside from a discman), a programmer (professionally paid to work on php, mysql, perl), college degreed (computer science), 26, in that weird pre-engaged stage with a woman way smarter than me, a mac, a pc, a college football fan (Texas Tech), a board modern and retro gamer.

I am located in Lubbock, Tx, looking to move to Oklahoma City area. Currently I am catching up on my ds and wii gaming as my 360 decided it would RRoD on me last week while watching a DVD on the HD expansion.

Thank you Shane for all the entertainment!

[javierdlopez]

Welcome! Glad you're no longer a lurker.

I went through the whole RROD thing myself last year. Gave me a chance to catch up on some Wii titles myself.

[Shane R. Monroe]

Fantastic! I'm SO glad to see another lurker come out of the shadows! Welcome to the new Monroeworld Portal and the forums!

WHO HOO!! Another PHP/mySQL guy!

[alexjlopez]

Welcome Jesse!

[November Mike]

Yes welcome to this wonderfully exciting forum in an official kind of way. I am a former lurker myself, so welcome.

[asciimov]

All: Thanks For the welcome.

Shane: To differentiate myself the other php guys, I'm the one that uses vim as my editor. Also, if the need for volunteer programming ever arises for this site, please feel free to message me, its the least I could do to give back.

[Shane R. Monroe]

You best be careful what you offer up around here. I'm the sole coder for the whole portal - and things get overwhelming at times

It's great to have an oldschool programmer about the house. VIM? You're a real man. I'm an old Commodore guy - I've never had to be without a fairly robust IDE and I'm pretty spoiled. However, the difference between me (and you) and the current generation of code monkeys is - we CAN do it by hand if the need arises.

Heck, Dreamweaver is BARELY a PHP IDE. At least the way *I* use it. A little intellisense doesn't make an IDE, I always say.

I've been tempted to look into some of the dedicated PHP editors, just to see if I'm missing anything - but I really don't want IDE code generation in my applications if I can help it. So hard to extend and reuse that code. Ever see the Javascript code that DW generates for it's behaviors? FORGET IT.

Heh ...

So, man ... do you have a classic gaming background too?

[joejet]

Welcome Jesse! - I just realized shane has really brought in the "younger" crowd - but since you were around from 2002, surprised you were here at all? So you were a retrogamer that didnt have the chance to enjoy them orginally???

[asciimov]

Shane: The last IDE I have used for php was an older version of Zend Studio (and that was at my last job). I liked it for the most part, but really the only thing I miss from it is the debugger. (Un?)Fortunately I haven't really used Dreamweaver in about 10 years. Does it allow you to use a dark theme (ie... black background) when doing syntax highlighting?

Classic / Retro gaming: I started gaming when I was 4 years old and received my first NES. I do have some vague memory of playing a pacman clone on a C64 when i was about 3 (so sometime around 1986 or early 1987). First let me say, my family was poor when i was growing up (first vcr came in '95, computer '97, more than 4 tv channels '99). So early visits to arcades required rationing of the quarters that I was given (if i was given any) and I quickly learned it was the quality of the game that mattered (almost always they were retrogames). By the time I could have summer jobs and work (as a teen) most of the arcades were gone, so I would buy sale games or rent. When the first computer came into the family in 97, i had a horrible time getting games to run (this was before most games had windows installers, and our computer had win95b which was when dos started getting gimped). So after about 6 weeks of having the computer and internet I found emulation, which really opened up my world of retro gaming.

In the years since, especially after getting my first teenager job, I became interested in the history of gaming and computing. I have played a ton of games over the years. My favorite retro games from being a kid (on real hardware) are Galaga, Discs of Tron (the arcade that had this closed a month after getting it), Warlords, and pinball. Games I would love a chance to play in the real arcade I, Robot, Star Wars (the original, not remake), and Dragon's Lair (which as sacrilegious to say around here, I have never played). I am a side scroller and adventure game fan (my favorite is Flashback). So much so that when I took the only video game class in college, a friend and I made a game called Walker and MacGyver. Walker (as in Texas Ranger) was the bad guy, you got to play as MacGyver. Most of the game play was collecting things to build in game items (MacGyver Style mind you). Eventually you had to build a gun (out of your random collected items) and shoot Walker in the back.