About

The Shogun version

My name is Tudor. I live and work as a multimedia developer web designer/IT manager (strange position, I know) in Bucharest, Romania. I hate this city, probably the city with the worst pollution problems in Europe, if not the whole wide world.

But to be fair, it was the only logical alternative to my birth town of Buzau, 110Km North-East of Bucharest. I grew up there, went to school and high school there, and left in 1993 to attend a university in the proud capital of our nation (see the pollution link above, in case you missed it). I sometimes miss the quiet small town and the old high school friends and parties, but I don’t think I could ever go back… The place is dead.

Well, after high school graduation I gave in to my mother’s persistence and went to the so-called National Sports Academy, supposedly to become a sports teacher. It was closely related to the fact that I had practiced athletics for about 10 years during school (and pretty successful, I should modestly add), still I used to hate her for talking me into it and myself for being such a pea-brains mother’s boy. Things have cooled down almost completely now, thank God! I mean, come on, how long can you hold a grudge against your own mother, even if it was probably the most traumatic experience of one’s teenage years?

But I hear you wonder what the hell could sports and computers have in common, and to be honest – not much. And in my case practically nothing. My experience with computers was limited to owning a Sinclair ZX Spectrum unauthorized clone during senior high school years, which my father still has stashed somewhere. Last time I checked was in early 2004 and it was still working! I remember getting my hands on some interesting books covering advanced assembly programming for the Z80. They made almost no sense for me, but I still read them cover to cover (including the appendixes), and more than one time over.

Returning to early 1994, it was probably those books that made me go to an interview for a computer related job. And (Yes! I hear you!) the connection was that during the same period I was in a frantic search for a suitable way to inform my mother I had dropped out of the freaking sports university. There you have it, my own home cooked recipe for connecting sports and computers. Come to think of it, I think it’s quite a nice story about guts and lying through a job interview, maybe I’ll post it here some day.

Note: This is by no means finished. A shorter (and probably more pleasant) version is also planned, but I just can’t find the time to write it.