Hi, my name is Joel. I'm 17 years old. I guess this is where I tell you a little about myself. My favorite color is orange, then my second most favorite color is green. I love pepperoni pizza (I know, it's so cliche) from a local pizza comapny called LaRosa's Pizza. As far as politics go, I took the World's Smallest Political Quiz and I'm liberal libertian (whatever that means). I like many different genres of of music. For when I'm doing homework, I mostly listen to techno. I also enjoy certain types of rock, oldies, symphonic power metal, soundtracks for movies like Juno. The last song I listened to on my computer is Voldemort Can't Stop the Rock! by Harry and the Potters, 21 hours 20 minutes 45 seconds ago. My favorite movies are Garden State, Iron Man, the Jason Bourne Series, the Harry Potter films, and many others. I also really enjoyed the Dark Knight. My favorite television show is the Office. A friend of mine introduced a online show called Pure Pwnage and it was awesome. Funniest show ever.
I am a Presbyterian (a denomination of Christianity). I go to St. Xavier High School, which is a very competent Catholic high school. In school, my favorite subject is religion and any computer science class. I took violin lessons for over five years and was in my school's string ensemble for two years. I was lucky enough to get employed this summer as a web programmer. The job has taught me many useful things about the field. I also make a nice bit of money doing it.
When choosing an operating system, I would choose Windows XP over everything else because it's what I grew up on. I have experience fixing software and hardware problems on Windows. I like using Macs for fun (they are very pretty looking') but I can't work on them because the user-interface is still somewhat foreign to me. A while back, I bought a video card, hard drive, motherboard, etc. and built my own computer. It currently has two monitors and two 2.2 GHz processors. That's a total of 4.4 GHz (up to about 5.0 GHz when I overclock). People have tried to convert me to Linux but all of the distros I've tried (Fedora, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Debian, Knoppix) have been to much trouble to make them worth it.
Outside of the virtual world of computers, I enjoy roller-blading and playing Ultimate Frisbee with my church youth group. A recent venture of mine has been learning how to solve the Rubik's Cube. Currently, my fastest time to solve a fully scrambled cube is 44.51 seconds and my average is 1 minute and 21.06 seconds. I recently aquired a Rubik's Revenge, which is the same thing as a Rubik's Cube, but is 4 by 4 by 4, instead of 3 by 3 by 3. I also have a Megaminx, a Pocket Cube, and a Square 1. I haven't been able to completely the Megaminx or the Square 1. Aside from goofing off with colorful puzzles, I also like doing service projects with my youth group, such as doing clean-up projects and going to a soup kitchen, called City Gospel Mission. I like to read science fiction, fantasy, and the Da Vinci code. My favorite book series is the Ender's Game series.
My main hobby is programming. The first language I learned was a fun little language called Logo. It was used to navigate a turtle using "steps". I used to take Visual C++ .net lessons, but the whole Object Oriented Programming thing was too hard for meto grasp at the time. I've also know HTML and CSS for a long time (yes, I know. It's not a programming language. It's markup). Currently, I've been devoting a lot of time learning PHP and mySQL. I also pride myself in knowing Javascript. One of my largest PHP projects is Kryptix, an online challenge site. I've learned Java somewhat well through a 3-course programming series at my school. To show how much I've been programming lately, here are some random statistics. Since October 26, 2007, I have hit a key on my keyboard 2,516,933 times, moved the mouse 139.214 miles, and I have clicked my mouse 1,658,824 times. The last time I updated these statistics on August 20, 2008. Yeah, I'm a computer nerd.
Have fun,
Joel |
