Introduction

[Nathan Yospe]

On Thu, 3 Apr 1997, Shawn Halpenny wrote:

:Hello, all :)  This is my first (and thus introductory) post to this
:list so here's a bit of background about myself:

We have several new people on the list, the majority of the ones we were
trying to acquire, I believe... what say we do a roll call/reintroduction,
both for the new members, and to refresh on who is doing what. The older
members, of course, are most familiar with us vocal sorts, but still...

I'll go first.

My name is Nathan Yospe, AKA FireBrand, Lissajous, and occasionally Tony
Aspe. I am a student of Biomedical Physics, with a real interest in
nanotech, and a firm belief that it could be a realistic goal for science
in the next fifty years. I got into programming because of an internship
just out of high school, and have managed to make my way into cometancy
with no formal training, particularly in C++, though I am fluent in
several other languages... everything but Pascal, pretty much. And ADA. I
got introduced to MUDs by my roommate (then, and, after a two year interm,
now) about three years ago. I played them, a full scale addict, for three
months, Mercs, mostly, though I was a reg on Discworld (lp), TF2000 (MU*),  
and a few others, including a short stint on Island (solved the puzzles,
got bored) and a few others. About six months after starting, I was
reduced to a half hour at most a day, stopping on to chat... a year after
starting, I began coding my first ROM. It was nothing special, codewise,
and I didn't own the account... but I gave it a coherent world, a world
split between chthulu/gothic magic and techno/cyberpunk technology. The
establishment of a battlezone between them, where a veil of
noncommunication had failed after 7000 years, was one of my proudest
accomplishments. Felix should remember this... he wrote the central city
of the tech world, ScienChron. I was just getting into it when the owner
of the account got drunk and deleted the mud one night in order to
"upgrade" to ROM 2.4. I hung on for a few weeks, but the magic had died,
and I had just gotten an opportunity to start my own MUD with a classmate
in the physics dept. I invited Felix to join me there, as he had impressed
me (and Dan Mazeau, that young man I had originally known as a punk kid,
has continued to do so. He will be the best of us yet.) and started on
Singularity, the ROM that, ultimately, grew beyond the limitations of its
codebase. In mid August, I started rewriting ROM in C++. It took me two
days. It was great. It.... sucked. I had barely learned what C++ meant.
The objects were crude, used no inheritance... encapsulation was shakey..
and so I began again. And again. I started getting input from people on
the mud related newsgroups, but most of them had no clue. Russ Taylor was
the worst. Eventually, Chris Lawrance contacted me with an invite to the
first incarnation of this list, and I discovered just how much was left in
potential improvements... v.2 went into the rubbbish, then v.3. I'm on v.5
now, and feel almost confident enough to play with the big boys. I have
graduated from mount control programming in Fortran to database back end
programming in C++, and neural nets have slipped their way into my mud
code, in a form... I've mastered threads, and sockets... and I just know
sometime within the next week, somebody is going to post something to this
list that is going to make me say "Whoa! How could I have been so
clueless? Ah, well, back to the drawing board."

   __    _   __  _   _   ,  ,  , ,  
  /_  / / ) /_  /_) / ) /| /| / /\            First Light of a Nova Dawn
 /   / / \ /_  /_) / \ /-|/ |/ /_/            Final Night of a World Gone
Nathan F. Yospe - University of Hawaii Dept of Physics - yospe at hawaii.edu