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 Godspeed by Anberlin, 3 hours 38 minutes 25 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 2,567,484 times, moved the mouse 142.89 miles, and I have clicked my mouse 1,705,942 times. The last time I updated these statistics on August 25, 2008. Yeah, I'm a computer nerd.
Have fun,
Joel |
