About Me
I am a 55 year old retired statistician and database programmer. My last job was supervising the Consumer Product Safety Risk Management System (CPSRMS, or as I liked to call it, “Crappy Mess”), a portion of which feeds into the public database on SaferProducts.gov.
These days I play lots of board games and try to learn game programming. Playing board games lets me live the childhood I missed because so much messed up shit was going on. I love programming, and game programming is allowing me to expand my skills into new areas.
For board games, I mostly play Tuesdays and Thursday nights at The End Games, and other less regular or irregular game groups. My favorite games are probably Cosmoctopus and Inis, but I have a constantly growing collection of games I play, and I often play games other people bring to these events. At the End Games I have set up a league with a multi-player variant of the Elo rating system. It’s just for bragging rights, though.
I used to play RPGs regularly, but I’m taking a break from running RPGs after my last campaign ended. I used to play D&D, but I dont want to continue with that system. I really don’t like Wizard’s of the Coast’s attitude toward their customers, and I find the quality of their books to be really poor. I have some ideas for a Pathfinder campaign in a homebrew world, but it’s going to be a while before I get back in gear on the Pathfinder rules and get the campaign running.
For game programming I am currently working on learning C#. This is one of the language you can use with the Unity game design system, which I am to learn next. Then I’m going to try to recreate six simple, classic games before I try making any “new” games. I generally program in Python, although I made a name for myself programming SAS at my old job. C# is a much different programming language than Python, and it’s taking some work to adjust to the more constricted C# language. But I’m enjoying the learning, and I think adding C# to my skills will improve my programming overall.