User:WhiteHowler

WhiteHowler has been using Wikipedia for years, but finally decided to sign up (and do some minor article edits) in November 2005. He is currently a corporate IT drone working in the northernmost reaches of Idaho.

Background
I was born and raised in the suburbs of the San Francisco bay area, until moving to Alabama when I was 14.

I've been playing with computers since I got my Commodore VIC-20 back in second grade. I taught myself C++ when I was 15, and used it to write several widely-released tweaks and modifications for the WWIV Bulletin Board System software.

After an on-again, off-again relationship with the Computer Science department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, I landed a job in Birmingham, Alabama as a Software QA Engineer. During my two years there, I picked up a scary amount of knowledge about SQL and the Microsoft .NET languages. I also designed several large PHP/MySQL websites as a hobby during this time.

I married my wonderful wife in November 2003 after dating her for over five years. We're a perfect match for each other, in that I'm generally a complete screw-up, and she has a neverending amount of patience and compassion that allows her to deal with me on a daily basis.

Fast-forward to 2005, and I'm now working as a lead software tester in northern Idaho while trying to juggle an insane (and growing) number of interests and hobbies.

Hobbies and Such
I'm a huge boardgaming geek and own a collection of European-style boardgames that occupies the better part of two bookcases. Among my favorites are Ticket to Ride, Bohnanza, Citadels, Evo, and Settlers of Catan.

Video gaming is another huge time-sink, and I consider myself a pretty big "console whore", snatching up every new system that comes out. I have a weak spot for action RPG's (like the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series), which have proven to be a blast to play through with my wife.

Over the last few years, I've also tried (with varying degress of success) guitar, karate, cooking, writing (both fiction and for an online news-zine), web design and development, miniature figure painting, and small-scale electronics design.

Interesting Tidbits

 * Founder and administrator of the PVP Audio Network, a collective of Internet radio broadcasters
 * Host of the Idle Minds Radio program, a semi-popular Internet-only broadcast that ran from 1999 until 2004
 * Co-founder and former guild leader of the World of Warcraft guild Tusk and Talon on the Mal'ganis server