Recently I have become more and more interested in Object Oriented Design and Object Oriented Analysis (OOD/OOA). We use Rational Rose 98 where I work and I am reading some books on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). I'm very interested in using this technology in new development.

As I'm expanding and refining this web site of mine, I am also becoming more interested in web development including technologies such as JavaScript, DHTML, ASP, etc. Unfortunately, I am somewhat limited in the technologies I can include on this page. For the most part, I am limited to using server side scripting, etc. as opposed to server-side scripts. That means that I can't do any ASP, unfortunately.

Of course, my early experiences with software also trace back to my family's Apple //c. With 128K RAM and a floppy drive, it wasn't the greatest thing on the block, but it was a good start. Two things helped to get me interested in programming. First, the fact that the Apple IIs came with AppleBASIC, Apple's own version of BASIC. Secondly, was my older brother David's prior knowledge of programming. While he was home from college during a break, I watched as he pounded out a program for generating characters for a role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons. After he returned to college, I started to play with the program. In a sense, you might say that my first programming experience was maintaining and enhancing someone else's code. I spent a lot of time developing games, utilities and examining existing programs on that Apple //c.

In 1991, when I first got an IBM compatible PC, I was amazed with its speed and storage capacity. It was a no-name IBM clone with an 80386-25MHz and an 80MB hard drive. (To read more about my experiences with computer hardware, see my Hardware Page.) However, perhaps what impressed me the most was Windows 3.0. It was a big step up from Apple PRO-DOS or Apple DOS 3.3.

As I went back to college with this computer, I quickly found ways to crash and destroy Windows and learned (from hard experience) the ins and outs of installing, configuring and tuning Windows 3.0 and 3.11 (WFW). I learned a lot about IBM PCs simply by tinkering and fiddling with Windows and DOS. I learned how to write batch programs for DOS and how to install and reinstall and reinstall and reinstall Windows. Magazines like PC Magazine and PC/Computing were a lot of help, especially PC/Computing's *.* column.

But what I missed was the ability to write my own programs. There was Q-BASIC on the PC, but I was more interested in writing Windows programs. Then, along came Visual Basic 1.0 which I bought in the summer of 1991, I believe. Boy! VB was quite different from AppleBASIC! It was event driven and at first I had trouble understanding the structure of VB programs. But it only took me a few weeks to get a decent grasp of it.

And so I slowly taught myself Visual Basic. I kept buying the new versions, through version 4 to keep up with it. Version 1 was kind of ridiculous. By version 4, VB was becoming quite robust, especially its database support (with ODBC).

And now I am working with Visual Basic 5. I've been using ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) in conjunction with an ODBC connection to Oracle 8. I've learned lots of tricks and only wish I had more free time to do some of my own development on the site.

At home I have VB 6, but I haven't gotten a chance to play around with it too much. I'd like to explore its potential with DHTML and create some more ActiveX controls of my own.

More to be added soon ...