About Hrothgar

I took the name "Hrothgar" from the famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and adopted it as one of my aliases on the Montreal BBSing scene starting in January 1989. Hrothgar inhabited mostly Amiga BBSes until the closing of Surfside Resort BBS in 1997, prompting his arrival on the Web.

My only other regular BBSing persona, the slightly older "Amorph" (named after a green amorphous critter in the 1987 Rainbow Arts game "Garrison II"), started its existence on Asylum BBS in 1988 and continued to eke out the semblance of a life on McBBS until that board closed in 2000.

I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in History (1994) from Concordia University in Montreal, and a Bachelor of Computer Science degree (1999) in Information Systems, also from Concordia.

I am currently employed as a Software Developer in a small company in St. Laurent, Québec, Canada.

I have had many hobbies, but generally I get tired of them after some number of years. Hobbies of note include:

• Bug collecting: I really liked insects when I was a kid. I liked to play with them, and I mounted dead ones on styrofoam meat trays. I gave that up when I was maybe 8 years old. Now I'm less destructive and just like to observe insects instead. I've forgotten most of what I knew when I was a kid. I still get a thrill from watching some of my favourite six-legged critters, though.
• Coin collecting: I had quite a nice collection when I was 9-12 years old. Now the damp has been at them and they look pretty bad.
• Astronomy: I started stargazing when I was a teenager. I got a little 4-inch reflector telescope back then and I'd often spend evenings outdoors watching the sky. Now I mostly just watch documentaries on television and "observe" using The Digital Universe software on my computer.
• Computing: My brother introduced me to computing in the early 1980s with his Commodore PET, and by 1983 I had convinced my father to get a computer for the "family" (used 98% of the time by me alone). I taught myself programming in BASIC with some 6502 Assembly thrown in for good measure. I also played a lot of great video games. I still consider computing a hobby of mine even though I spend >40 hours a week chained in front of one at work. My home computer is an Amiga, and that makes all the difference.
• BBSing: I miss this one.
• Computer collecting: This started in, I think, 1991, when I purchased a Commodore VIC-20 just to play with. I now have about 60 computers in the house, mostly dating from the 1980s, with some earlier ones and a few from as recently as the late 1990s. At one time I had wanted to write a book about personal computer history. I'm currently quite fed up with this hobby, though. Too much space is required, and I don't find that I am interested enough anymore to operate the machines. Machines that aren't turned on occasionally have a habit of breaking down when you're not looking at them. I'm thinking of just keeping my Amigas plus some Commodore, Atari, and Apple 8-bits.
• Poetry: I just started writing poetry recently, and I haven't found much time for it yet. I've sent a few poems off to friends and got positive responses. Maybe they're just being polite.
• Genealogy: The urge to work on this comes and goes. It looks like I'm my own fifth cousin.

I believe that this list of hobbies proves that I am a geek.