Ah, looks like I'm quite a bit older than most on the forum here (late 30's), and I'm in the 'states', California to be exact. Married, I have a 12 year old and a new baby on the way.

I've worked as an opto-electronics engineer for the past 13 years, prior to that I worked selling / supporting / repairing Macs (we're talking the original Macintosh here) and before that I was in school and did various odd jobs (postal service, worked on cars, etc). I started tinkering with computers back when I was 12 or so, started slowly with Pascal and BASIC, then on to a bit of C and eventually PHP for the web a few years back. I've done most of the website and backend for my employer and of course I contribute to forums for fun and have done alot of freebie one-off scripts for people. I tinker in Perl and Java when needed.

I'm also a big Linux / system build freak & into tinkering with 802.11 and hacking Linksys routers.