About Myself

Written by Phinn

Name's Phinn. What do I do? Well, I do a lot of things, and I've done a lot things. Right now I do math, and I do math well, or at least that's what people say. But you know 4 years ago when I was a senior in high school I would have laughed in your face if you told me I was going to end up becoming a computer programmer and a mathematician. You see I had this life changing event happened to me after I got out of high school... something that I don't really want to talk about... So what did I do after this life changing event? I did what anybody would do, I got a job. Then after about three months of working at this shit hole job I decided I wanted to go to school, but I didn't have the grades to go to a major university (I barely graduated high school with a 1.1 average) so instead I went to my local community college. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to do something with computers because I have always loved computers, in fact the best class I took in high school was class where we learned QBASIC. So I looked up the various computing career paths and decided that I wanted to pursue computer science.

I then started taking the math I need to get into calculus, and it wasn't long till I was able to get into a calculus class, well it wasn't exactly a class, I did an independent study at a tutorial service the school offered. At the same time I was starting my journey into calculus the tutorial service offered me a job because I had done so well in my pre-calculus classes. Needless to say I gladly accepted the job, and so I began tutoring people of all ages, shapes, and sizes. As I advanced I found myself helping people with things like linear algebra, advanced calculus, and differential equations. In fact even the instuctors would come to me for help when they couldn't figure out a problem or when they were having a hard time helping a student understand something. So I eventually got a degree and transfered to a major university, where I declared my major as Mathematics-Computer Science. Now I'm half a year into my major and going strong.

So what's the moral of the story? Well, if I can do it than you can do it. Remember, I had this life changing event that basically turned my life upside down. The key is to never give up, and something all of you should know. I especially say this to all of you younger people out there who are looking at these math tutorials I'm about to write as a way to learn more than what they teach you at school. This stuff will be really tough at times, but if you can understand it, which I know all of you out there can, you'll be a better coder, and a better person. And once you understand this stuff you never know what new effects you might discover, or what new contributions to you might make to the scene.

Anyway, I bet you're all are wondering how I found out the demo scence. Well, about the same time I got the job at the community college (two years ago), my dad bought me my first computer. It was a Gateway 166 with 32 megs of RAM... this christmas it became a PII 350 with a 128 megs :o]... Anyway, when I got the computer the first two things I bought for it was Quake, and _Teach Yourself C in 21 days_, which came with Borland C++ 4.5... RTFLOL ;o]. Then after going through the book and playing A LOT of Quake, I decided I wanted to know more about graphics. I didn't really know how they were done so I just typed "computer graphics" in at Yahoo, and lo and behold there was some stuff about graphics programming.

I think the first real demo web site I went to was "Spyco's Demo Page" or something like that. There I found Denthor's tutorials, both in C and Pascal, and after clicking on some links I found myself at "PC Demos Explained." I read the entire page, and thought it was great. From there I found out about Hornet, and "PC Demo Fan Club." The first demo I downloaded was the intro Lithium by Vista, I think I got it off "PC Demo Fan Club" because it was one of the decent new demos. When I saw I about pissed my pants... no kidding, I was frackin' amazed. I said to myself I wanna do that sort of stuff, and so I set out trying to learn about it. And that's where I've been for the past two years, just lurking around, watching in awe and thinking to myself "I wish I was part of a group..." ... Shameless plug time :), if anyone out there is looking for a coder let me know, maybe I can do something for you... Anyway, like I said I've been lurking around, until I was reading Hugi and saw that Adok was looking for someone to write Math tutorials. I thought this is something I can do and it will give me an opertunity to contribute to the scene, so here I am.

And to all you ladies out there ;), sorry but I'm engaged to a girl whose handle is BuG (it stands for Bitchin' underware Groupie). We're going to be married in Augest this year. As for my handle, if you really wanna know, it's a combination of Dolphin (because I swim like one) and Finn, the fence in Willam Gibson's most excellent Novels.

- Phinn