I am a bit of a "Technology Enthuiast" a.k.a "geek". I have had the interest ever since I got my first computer back in the early 1980's. It was the good old Commodore Vic20!! How many of you are old enough to remember that classic?

I moved on from there with an upgrade to the Commodore 64. That computer severed me well throughout high school and my B.Sc. I spent a lot of time programming it and typing in programs from Compute's Gazette! I still used it some during the M.Sc. and Ph.D., but more for recreation rather than serious work.

I used my supervisor's Mac (an Apple IIIe or something along that line if I recall correctly) for my M.Sc. thesis. That was my first serious use of Apple products.

During my Ph.D. I was still using Mac for a bit in the lab, but then I purchased my first Intel Pentium 90 machine with Windows 3.1 in 1996. This was also around the time when the internet was just taking off and I got online and started with GeoCities as my first website host. I got a book on HTML and was making my websites by editing the HTML code directly in Notepad! I even touched on a little bit of JavaScript and wrote a "Guess the number" game on my website.(I still have the code for that game, but it is not on my website now.)

Hindsight being what it is, I could have easily done my degree in Computer Science rather than Chemistry, but it was science that I was interested in at the time. During my Ph.D. I became more and more interested in all things computer related. So my job at Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) was aptly suited as I could be working with computers and software but still make use of my Chemistry degree without having to be stuck behind a lab bench all day.

During my tenure at ACD/Labs I got back into doing some computer programming. I had not really done any since taking FORTRAN in some first year computer courses during my B.Sc plus the BASIC programming on the Commodore 64. As can be found in my Portfolio section, I was writing some programs with the ACD/ChemBasic scripting language. It is really an object oriented scripting language and is similar to VisualBasic and not the procedural BASIC of yore that I was familiar with. I essentially learned it from scratch and using the guide, help files and previously written ChemBasic "Goodies" as examples. I got very good at it.

I also got into programming for the PalmOS platform using NSBasic/Palm as the development tool. I was using a Sony Clie as my Palm device and then also a Palm Treo 600 smartphone. This was in the heyday of the PalmOS devices so it was fun to get into.

Now I am using the iPhone 3G. I have not got into programming for it yet as there is quite a learning curve for me. I have a book on Objective-C 2.0 and need to start going through it.

On the desktop side of things, I switched over to Mac as my platform. I only use Windows in a virtual machine by either VMware Fusion or Parallels. As for programming, I am using REAL Studio. It is a cross platform development tool and I can build applications for Mac, Windows and Linux.

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