User since: Aug 12, 2003 at 11:55 UTC Last here: May 17, 2013 at 12:38 UTC (1 week ago) Experience: 1694 Level: Hermit (10) Writeups: 76 Location: Netherlands User's localtime: May 26, 2013 at 10:34 GMT-2 Scratchpad: View

Characteristics:

• Giant female (6'6")
• Vegetarian
• Dutch, not in Amsterdam
• Stubborn, cats, teasing, reading, movies, SF
• Headbanging speedmetalhead: Kiss, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Annihilator, Testament, Within Temptation
• Concerta/Ritalin-taking ADHD, sometimes nervous, often just being silly hyperactive
• Politician, former council member, member of Dutch liberal party (yeah, a politician)
• Radical atheist
• Beginning writer, mostly SF
• Love whisky and whiskey, especially Laphroaigh, Glenrothes and Connemara
• Sometimes I bark at the moon, play tag or tap someone "on the other shoulder", while trying to look like an innocent lovable 40-year old

Programming:

• 1983: Pascal (never used it outside the classroom)
• 1986: dBase III+ and Basic (horrible, never used them outside the classroom)
• 1987: TenCORE (amazingly good CBT development system and programming language, helped me provide for my income for over 7 years), Lisp (yegh blergh), C (did 2 $projects)
• 1994: Perl, mostly minor work until 1997
• 1994 etc: bits and pieces of PHP, Javas‎crip‎t, C++, not enough to be able to work with it, enough to stick with Perl

Learned the basics of Perl in 1994. For years I mostly did simple basic things with Perl like s‎crip‎ts for forms and server logs. In 1999 tried to learn more. In 2003 I tried again and even made a japh. I'll be quiet mostly, read and vote, and learn a lot. So that's what I wrote my first Meditation about: Where and how to start learning Perl. I made a Dutch translation, slightly adapted.

Still not feeling comfortable to answer questions. Most of my own questions I answer myself, using the immense amount of books, websites, monk and monger stuff, usenet and documentation that's available. The things I can't figure out myself, I ask liz, who's my colleague and partner and wife (we married March 1, 2005)(yes, in The Netherlands it's possible for 2 women to marry).

Monk history (it's a silly game and I use it as such, nice toy)

initiate	0-19	2003-08-12
novice	20-49	2003-08-14
acolyte	50-99	2003-08-15
scribe	100-199	2003-08-16
monk	200-499	2003-08-19
friar	500-999	2003-09-22
abbot	1000-1599	2003-12-04
bishop	1600-2299	2004-02-04
pontiff	2300-2999	2004-05-12
saint	3000+	2004-08-06
saint #190	4160	2004-12-03

I was amazed at the ease I gained XP, that I even became a rather high ranking Saint (well, in the old system, before October 2005). Completely undeserved, because my Perl skills were (and still are) not even enough to work with modules or databases. At some point, I started to dislike this XP game. I decided to start over, so I visited thepen and lost XP. My downfall:

pontiff	2300-2999	2004-12-08
bishop	1600-2299	2004-12-13
abbot	1000-1599	2004-12-18
friar	500-999	2004-12-23
monk	200-499	2004-12-29
scribe	100-199	2005-01-03
acolyte	50-99	2005-01-05
novice	20-49	2005-01-07
initiate	0-19	2005-01-08
novice	20-49	2005-01-10

I was planning to stay at novice-level until I would feel more confident about my Perl skills. My skills improved a little bit, and because the ranking system changed in a very interesting way, I thought I'd stop using thepen for a while.

acolyte	50-89	2005-11-10
sexton	90-149	2005-11-26
beadle	150-249	2005-12-12
scribe	250-399	2006-01-07
monk	400-599	2006-03-02
pilgrim	600-899	2006-04-??
friar	900-1299	2006-05-11