I am a retired Captain of the 7th Fleet, Earth Invasion Force. In my spare time I dabble with Computational Linguistics and Perl. I'm good at neither, but derive a great deal of satisfaction from these subjects.

Besides planning for an invasion that never took place (we decided a covert infiltration in our new human bodies was the more humane solution, as who would notice a few hundred more weirdos on the face of the Earth?), I have been almost every type of software developer possible (although COBOL only tortured me in college and the many nightmares since). I've been a Java, C#.Net, VB6, C, C++, PalmOS, Perl, Sys admin, DBA (Oracle and even pushed a little MySQL), whatever. I'll probably never take another developer job in another widget factory, having served time in telecommunications, custom software shops, GIS/Avionics embedded, and academics.

http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/2003/02/19/engine.html