User:Brent Gulanowski/Biography

I was born in a suburb of Toronto. My family moved to a satellite city, Barrie, when I was five, and I was soon living a pretty free and easy life, aside from doing chores and being restricted from over-indulging in Saturday morning cartoons, the staple of my generation's youth.

A precocious and independent-minded youngster, I quickly learned that my insatiable appetite for new ideas was not shared by everyone. I learned to learn on my own, becoming an avid reader fairly early. I read widely and sporadically, but with a significant weakness for science and technology, especially stories and predictions about the future. I discovered J. R. R. Tolkien in grade seven, and fell in love with science fiction, especially works by Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven.

Barrie was a somewhat strange place to live, rather culturally wanting, so I made do with riding my bike, hanging out in abandoned farmers fields and wood lots (in the Summer), playing Colecovision at Towers and working at a paper route (which gained me a brief notoriety) and later assisting at a local convenience store. I continued to read and do well in school without effort. I was enrolled in a gifted program which started to intrigue me regarding academics, but not seriously. My pattern of co-dependent, passive aggressive relations with school was settling in. I developed a tendency to become infatuated with some pretty girl whom I would idolize and view with awe approaching terror. (I later consoled myself that James Joyce had a similar affectation.)

My family moved again when I was fifteen, closer to "the big smoke" (as the outlying regions like to call Toronto), to a new house in Markham. Soon after, my dad got laid off from his job with Rothman's Tobacco, and things became a bit strained. I withdrew into my personal interests -- BMX bikes and, in 1987, my Amiga 500 computer and its games. I continued to devour science fiction and do well in science and math, though somewhat poorly in English and humanities. I toyed with drawing and learned about graphic design and typography. I found an interest in architecture, especially mediaeval castles.

I went to university at University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus, starting in 1989. After abandoning the idea of architecture studies, for which I felt ill-suited for lack of a portfolio, I rather impulsively chose science and specifically astrophysics. I quickly ran into trouble with mathematics and laboratory work. I spent my quality time playing Dungeons & Dragons and participating in a creative writing group. After two years floundering, failing, and procrastinating, I took a year off to take a depressing job in a bookstore in a decaying shopping mall. I had moved out of my parents' when I started second year in college, but had to move home again. School was better, so I went back and started over, switching to a humanities program.

I did well in English courses, and by third year (fifth including the two lost years) I was planning a specialist major in English literature and criticism, dropping my minors in art studio and humanities. Amusingly, I began to feel a sort of longing for science, especially computers, which I became more exposed to in my year-long tenure at the student newspaper, doing editorial and layout work on the Macs. I toyed with the idea of journalism, but felt it was too gritty. I decided I would be a writer. I continued to fall in love with girls, except now they had boyfriends. It would be another year before I would learn to not let that stop me, a morally ambivalent decision.

I moved away from home again, this time for good, when James, my former roommate, returned from his time in the U.S. acquiring a teaching certificate. We got a good place closer to downtown which gave us better exposure to the city's cultural and business environments. I got a job in a more interesting book store, a sort of curse I laid on myself I guess, eventually graduating into a series of bookstores and a fit of despair about my purpose in life vis a vis authorship. I had a brief, soul-destroying affair to aggravate my condition of self-absorbed nihilistic existential anxiety. It was all very silly, although I still have stress-induced flare-ups. (I now try to keep them in check with my personal weblog/diary.)

While mired in the poverty of bookstore employment, I had one benefit: free book borrowing priveleges. You cannot get current computer books at the library, but I had access to everything I cared to read about programming languages and operating systems, and, to my credit, I took full advantage. James bought a low-end Macintosh, which I proceeded to explore scientifically, learning all about system extensions, file types, and other rigamarole, and later, how to program it. I leveraged this knowledge into a significant career move: I got a job selling Macs at a local boutique. My income tripled virtually overnight, and I was able to soon pay back my defaulted student loans, returning me to a state of financial respectibility (though I was still practically poor, with the size of the payments).

Of course, once I had paid my debt to the government, what choice did I have but to do the whole thing all over again? Oh, right, I could have just gotten a programming job -- it was the late 1990s after all, before the tech crash. But no, I went back to school, this time at Ryerson University, for computer science. I am now in my fourth year. It has had its ups and downs, but I'm sticking with it, and intend to become a programmer/software engineer and work on one of:

• end-user applications
• games
• operating systems/system libraries
• artificial intelligence systems

I graduate (for the second time, yikes) in May 2004, if all goes well, and begin my search for gainful programming employment, in a much less attractive atmosphere than existed four years ago. I have already acquired some significant experience, producing a specialized image viewing tool for use by astronomers studying survey images of galactic clusters. This is to be open sourced and placed on SourceForge in the near future.

Now I'm just this guy who likes to mess around on the wiki, hopefully in a beneficial way for y'all.