Who Is Istvan
SDxWiki

What we think we know about Istvan:

What we don't know:

  1. What is his job (when he's actually doing it)?

  2. How old is he really?

  3. What does he look like?

  4. What kind of car does he drive? (Frank, John, and Jim surely wonder.) Frank Swierz Yes, this is perhaps the most important question of all. Answer carefully, Istvan. :)

  5. My job is hard to define, because it evolved more than anything else. I was actually hired as a database developer to help an accounting department get a handle on a severe royalties problem. That hire was premature, as I was taking C++ coursework at the time, trying to edge my way out of IT into entry-level development. The project ended up collapsing due to corporate reorg (I HATE working for a large company, even though it is lucrative), and to keep me around, I was asked if I'd take a position in accounting (gods help me) as the "royalties analyst". This was because I was the only schlep who knew anything at that point about how the division's royalties are paid out. I did it because the tech industry was collapsing in the Denver area, and my visible programming skills would require a stretch to be hired even at an entry level (and now that I was working again, the time and opportunities for more coursework are limited - this darn money is addictive stuff).

I picked up Perl on the fly as a quick-and-dirty solution to all the bulk data manipulation I was doing as part of the first project, and because I didn't have to fill out a corporate purchase order to obtain the interpreter. I've been applying it routinely on an ad-hoc basis to try to help my accounting cohorts research the sorts of nasty accounting problems they have - especially in dealing with an old mainframe-based system they were on until the company converted to SAP last year. I'm happy when I'm writing code, but unfortunately my real job mostly involves sitting around waiting for people to give me permission to pay out royalties, or mucking with spreadsheets to tell people how much they need to give me permission to pay out this month. As you can imagine, this does not require much mental activity. My semi-secret goal is to automate myself out of this job.

  1. I missed the Apollo 11 landing by five months, not that I'd have remembered it anyway. I was born in late December, '69. So I know I'm not older than dirt, but a LOT of the noise I see in games like JumpGate makes me feel ancient. I've become accustomed to being "old, boring guy" online. I was NOT happy to see the "E.T.: 20th Anniversary release" poster at the mall yesterday.

  2. My appearance ought not matter unless we're planning to go on a date, and while you guys are probably great company, I don't think any of you are my type. However, I'm a short guy, 5'6", brown hair, brown eyes, glasses. When I'm not banging on the Wiki, taking a moment to do real work, playing a game (online or off), or trying to keep up my house, I'm learning and teaching how to kill people with my hands, which is to say I do martial arts. That kind of keeps me in shape, but not so much lately because I'm stuck helping out with teaching right now. Not as much exercise involved standing around telling people what to do. Soon my present studio will be done collapsing and I can go find another to train at.

  3. Car.... Well. I am a technophile, and I dearly love efficiency and sleek lines when I can get them. Probably should have flown for Quantar... I have two cars, but my favorite is my 2000 Honda Insight gas-electic hybrid. 70 mpg, baby, and rides like my Dad's 1973 240Z. Standard transmission, of course. All-aluminum chassis, lowest drag coefficient of anything on the road except the infamous GM EV-1. And when the battery's got some charge, which is all of the time unless I've been driving like a maniac, the car performs like a sport coupe. Of course, if I discharge the battery all the way down, and haven't coasted or braked enough to recharge it a bit, the poor little 1-liter motor leaves me with the performance of a Geo Metro. Unless I sacrifice mileage and downshift.... All that and the dash looks like something off the bridge of the Enterprise-D.

Pisser is, my wife's commute is 45 miles each way, and mine is 9. Guess who drives the cool car on the weekdays? But every weekend it's all mine. Practical 98 Honda Civic hatchback takes me to work and back.

Bio

I'm an Army Brat, born somewhat to my embarrassment at Ft. Monmouth, NJ in 1969. Luckily, my folks moved to the San Diego area shortly after, so my mother could be near family with me while my father served two tours in Vietnam. We then lived in San Diego while my father picked up a degree in anthropology at SDSU on the Army's tab. I grew up with a dog and a cat in the house. I barely remember moving to Ft. Leavenworth and living there for about a year, but I have memories of crossing the Mississippi when we moved to Macomb, Illinois. I went to first grade there, and played with superhero action figures. Around 1976, we moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, where I went to elementary school, and rode my dirt bike a lot. I began to understand the news and remember being pretty scared about nuclear war and living twenty miles from Washington. I watched Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica, played with my Atari 2600 and Star Wars action figures, and was introduced to Basic D&D by a friend.

We moved to Camp Zama, near Tokyo, Japan in 1981, and lived there until 1984. I played D&D a lot, started to gamemaster, learned AD&D, and got a Commodore VIC-20. I learned Basic, fell in love with fantasy and science fiction, and became well-known to the post librarian. I read through LOTR something like fourteen times over the course of three years (there wasn't much new stuff in the post library). I also learned enough Japanese to get by, and religiously avoided games involving balls.

We returned to the DC area in '84, moving into the same house, which we'd kept. I went to high school in Bowie, MD, but kept to myself and had few real friends. I ran cross-country in my junior and senior years, and competed on the "brain bowl" teams. I read a lot, gamemastered AD&D, retired the venerable Atari, and played computer games on my Commodore 128, including such titles as Elite, Gunship, and Pirates. A friend had a game called Omnitrend's Universe on his Heath-Zenith, but I only ever got to watch him play. I learned to drive on a 1973 Volvo wagon (stick shift) my parents called "Henrietta Hog", but which I considered a cross between a main battle tank and an aircraft carrier. Rarely, my father would let me drive his 1973 Datsun 240Z, usually after I'd helped wash it. High school prom was the first time he ever let me drive it unsupervised - I think he was thrilled that I'd rather drive my date in a sports car than rent a limo. I was thrilled that I had a date, because I'd pretty much avoided the social scene for all of high school.

I went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1988, entering the physics program there. Having insulated myself socially in high school, college was where I finally found kindred spirits and good friends. I became somewhat computer-savvy, learned Pascal, played RPG's and strategy games, read, and became addicted to Wing Commander. I was in IRC during the big night of the Gulf War - I missed all the video, but I'll never forget the experience of being online with an international community that night. Late in college, some friends and I created and ran a couple "play-by-mail" strategy wargames, though we didn't use mail, whipping up maintenance utilities in Pascal to do the grunt work. My studies went random after I realized that due to bad advice and a severe lack of attention on my part, I had not picked up all the necessary math to grasp the physics I was taking in my junior year. After a quick trip to the "square root club", I spent an assessment semester taking history and anthro courses, got back on the honor roll, and ended up blasting through a 4-year degree in Latin and Greek in three semesters. So I have a degree in Classics (Greece, Rome), with minors in Astronomy, Physics, History, and Asian Studies. Renaissance education, making me practically unemployable.

While at Case, I met the wonderful lady who is now my wife. When we graduated, she was headed home to the Denver area for grad school in organic chemistry. Since I couldn't bear life without her, and had no reasonable plans, I simply followed and leaped into the Denver job market.

Fortunately, CWRU was very high-tech: you couldn't leave without knowing a bit about computers. In 1993 I looked for grunt tech support or QA work, landed a few QA contract jobs for a software localization company, then got hired on as IT staff at Galileo Intl in the Denver Tech Center. Galileo proved to me that I hate working for big companies, so I got another IT job doing tech support and LAN admin for a small company in Boulder. I did network support until about spring 2000, when I decided I hated it, too. I was in the middle of reeducating myself for a career change to entry-level programming, when a friend offered me a simple DB development job in a big company that looked like a path into software development. It didn't pan out that way, and I'm stuck working for a company that does not impress me, writing Perl scripts to save my sanity, while the tech industry in Denver has curled up into hibernation.

I'm still doing RPG's, playing more than GMing for the past five years, mostly using a heavily-modifed GURPS variant. I played Elite II when I was looking for work after just moving to Colorado. Other computer gaming high notes were Homeworld, Daggerfall, Freespace 2, and of course the Civilization games, (Civ, Civ II, Colonization, Alpha Centauri). I haven't picked up Civ III, because I'm stuck on this MMOG thing now. I played Mankind (Vibes/Cryo, France) for six months in 1999, and was active in that community until I was about to go nuts over all the bugs, and a chap named Vorg (The Vorg) sent me mail telling me about JumpGate. I lived and breathed JumpGate (NetDevil) from January 2000 until about the time the betas ended, trying to contribute constructively on the discussion boards. Being local to NetDevil, I built a relationship with the dev team, and wrote news directly for them as "Demosthenes", especially during the beta, but I also supplied a few stories post-release before finally becoming too disenchanted to contribute a few months ago. I worked directly with Markus (Iceman) Krichel on storyline for a couple weeks at one point, and was offered a preliminary version of the community manager job GBob eventually took. I couldn't let myself take it because the timing was exactly one month after I took that DB job that I thought would edge me into software development (man, that sucked). I think NetDevil was lucky, because they needed someone more like GBob and less like me, anyway. For grins right now, I play Dark Age of Camelot (Mythic), which has severe problems if you expect an RPG, but frankly and unlike JumpGate, doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is.

I still read a bit of fantasy and sci-fi. I'm also a little bit of a Trekker, but I'm not rabid and ignored pretty much everything after the second season of DS9. I followed Babylon 5 on TV religiously before cutting my cable, and I have nearly all episodes on videotape. I did a little bit of martial arts my last year of high school, enough to tell me I loved it. I found a nearby studio I liked in 1996, after the chaos of my early tech support career settled out, and I've trained there two or three nights a week ever since. That studio is in the process of closing, so I'm casting about elsewhere for good places to train while I help teach the last few students. My wife and I have no kids yet, but we have two cars (mentioned above), a nice house, and two cats who insist they don't get enough attention.

Probably what I most want out of life is interesting work, continued freedom to indulge my hobbies, and more opportunities to learn.

So, turnabout's fair play. Who are you guys? What do you want? What do you live for?

DWM Thanks for the life sketch! Indeed, turnabout's fair play is precisely the phrase that passed through my mind when I created this page. Sorry it took so long: Dan Muller/Bio

Frank Swierz You guys are both tough acts to follow. :) But here goes: Frank Swierz/Bio

John Harding/Bio