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 (http://sourceforge.net) 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.