User:Vasterror

From GenieWiki

Howdy!

I go by vasterror (easiest to type), VastError (when I started using this handle on AlphaWorld over 13 years ago) and some of my friends prefer to address me as VE durng chat (won't work as a handle, of course). Now the wiki software has decided to give me another variant. Oh, well.

So what does it mean? Nothing special. It struck my fancy, and I've used it since. I suppose it puts people off sometimes, like when I'm giving advice in a programming newsgroup...

I've done a lot of things in the Computer Age. (Hey, that would be cool one to add to the series, wouldn't it? Sort of bridge the gap between the Empires series and SWGB.) I was on the hardware design team for a mainframe (world's first commercial multiprocessor) and a PC variant, done a fair amount of documentation work, software testing, database design... but mostly, I'm a programmer. I used to say that I've got experience in 22 different programming languages, but I added it up the other night and it's now over 30 and heading for 40. I've never stopped learning, and won't until they plant me in the ground. Unfortunately, I did a stint as a manager, then the dot-com bubble burst and jobs were hard to come by. So there's this big gap in my resume that I haven't been able to bridge. So now I'm an electrician by day and work on whatever I feel like evenings and weekends. Sometimes I miss the high-tech rat race, but mostly I don't. (I racked up 250,000 airline miles in one 18 month period.)

For reasons that I won't go into here, you can't reach me by e-mail or chat right now. I hope to have the issues resolved soon, but it's out of my control. So if you have something to say, I understand the system will let me know if you've put something on my talk page the next time I login. Sorry, best I can do right now.