## BIO
My programming career began in 1994 at Bridgestone/Firestone. At the Des Moines plant I designed and wrote software for handheld barcode inventory trackers, and later implemented a barcode system for plantwide rubber production. My day-to-day duties involved automated collection of mainframe-contained data and generating associated charts. In 1997 I was hired by [login to view URL] and was entrusted with being the sole programmer responsible for putting them on the web. In later years the company was a (continued) huge success, and I left when it was bought out by Earthweb, Inc. Since 2001 I have been involved in numerous startups and freelance work.
## Area of Expertise
I am a programmer with 15+ years of experience and am based in Des Moines, Iowa (USA).
C/C++ is my language of choice (including CGI), and I do quite a bit of PHP work as well.
Platforms include Linux (and all other flavors of Unix), Windows, and PocketPC devices.
On the unix side, I'm a MySQL guru, experienced in system administration, and specialize in writing CGIs, background daemons, and apache modules. I'm a firm believer in the notion that even the largest jobs can be handled by the smallest hardware running unix, if the programmer is worth his salt.
On the Windows side I've written just about every type of client desktop application imaginable. In particular I enjoy Windows projects which require reading pixels from the screen and imploying artificial intelligence for the purpose of automating things not necessarily intended to be automated.
Types of applications for which I am especially well suited are:
* Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
* For example decoding 'captcha' images used on signup forms to prevent automated signups
* CGIs - All web-based applications
* Web site scrapers
* In general, automating anything which normally requires a user sitting in front of a browser.
* Instant Messaging clients
* Number crunching - Let's see how fast we can make it!
* Windows pattern recognition combined with Artificial Intelligence
* For example writing 'bots' to play Flash/Java games or casino games with an unhuman level of perfection.
* Sports and financials arbitrage
* Including automated trading.
* Browser-integrated products
* Anything that needs to run FAST and with the least amount of resources.
