Meet the Modders

Well, let's see.....

I'm 32 years old and live in Southern PA, but I'm not going to give out my real name, mainly due to the nature of my job.

I work for the US Army as a DOD civilian, and my job is to repair electronic devices for the US (and allied) Army.... That's all I'm going to say about that, since my job requires a SECRET security clearance just to get into the building I work in. I will say that it's a decent job, pays better than anything I've had outside the military (ironically, my current Civilian Wage Grade is equivalent to the Pay Grade I had when I got out of the Navy).

I recently graduated from Harrisburg Area Community College with an Associate in Science for Electronic Engineering Technology, and the college also helped me get my current job (they have an internship program with the Army base that I got in through, but it doesn't hurt that I also have a decent Veteran's Preference, and that the Secret security clearance that I had in the Navy was still valid when I signed on).

I also met a wonderful young lady at school, who I finally worked up enough neve to ask out on the very last day of class (about 3 weeks ago), and I couldn't believe she actually said yes! (Prior to this, AC-DC's Shot Down in Flames might as well have been my theme song when it came to asking ladies out) ...The funny thing is that she actually had a crush on me about as long as I've had a crush on her, but we were both just too shy to say anything until I finally decided that it is better to try and fail than to never have tried at all....

The best part is that we share a lot of the same interests, such as Computers (her major is Computer repair, and I met her last spring in one of the Computer Repair classes I had to take for my major), Sci-Fi/Fantasy (our first date was to see the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie :D), and gaming (she's never played Civ III, but she did have Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth, so I figure it's just a matter of time.....).

Anyways, enough about my girlfriend.....

My other hobbies include (but aren't limited to): LEGO construction (you can see some of my creations on my Photobucket Account), Martial Arts, Anime, Sci-fi/fantasy, building stuff, particularly if it's steampunk style (See most of my crazy inventions here), History (particularly early-modern-late industrial European and East Asian with an emphasis on Japan) and plants/flowers.

I was born in the same area I'm living in now, spent most of my life here, except for a 6-year stint in the US Navy, where I lived, among other places: Chicago, Virginia Beach, Yokosuka, Japan (The three years I was stationed there is the longest I've lived anywhere outside my home town area) and San Diego. After getting out of the Navy, I worked for a German-owned industrial electronics firm called Hirschmann, but I was laid off almost 2 years ago due to the recession... The fact that I had volunteered to go if they needed to get rid of anyone in production was of some comfort, because they kept everyone else and the other guys all had families to support, whereas I was single and didn't have any major expenses (the US Navy paid for my College).... Exactly one week later, my one electronics instructor/advisor at HACC informed the class that the Army base was accepting resumes for the internship program, and I applied and have been there since.

As for family, I have one younger brother who lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and 11-month old daughter (my niece is really cute, but then I'm kind of biased :lol: ), and I've got two cats: Goldilocks and Oreo.

On the religious side of things, I'm one of those crazy Mennonites living in an Amish paradise.... No seriously, my church split off the Mennonites sometime around 1700. While I'm deeply devout in my faith, I believe in tolerance and respect for those who have differing opinions... You know, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you and all that... Some of my closest friends during my tour in the US Navy were from widely divergent backgrounds (one whom I still keep in touch with is Agnostic and another who I still talk to from time to time is Druidic), but we managed to keep all religious discussions respectful and polite (not to mention that many interesting points were made and discussed during our gaming sessions)... My biggest gripe is with people who are intolerantly fundamentalist in ANY religion (or non-religion as the case may be... I'm looking at YOU Mr. Dawkins!)... I mean yes, there is only one belief system that can be right, but that doesn't mean we should be going around demonizing those who disagree with our viewpoints!

...Anyways, If I can find a fairly recent picture of myself, I'll post it here sometime....
 
Interesting background, Hikaro, a Mennonite in the military and not as a non-combatant corpsman or medic.
 
timerover51 said:
Interesting background, Hikaro, a Mennonite in the military and not as a non-combatant corpsman or medic.
Click to expand...

Actually I'm in the Church of the Brethren, which split off the main Anabaptist movement about 300 years ago, and while I was in what was technically a combat capability, I felt that I wasn't violating the whole non-violence clause by the fact that what I worked on was a point-defense weapon whose purpose was to shoot down incoming missiles so that they wouldn't blow everyone else up... The system didn't have near enough range to hit the aircraft launching the missiles, but it didn't need it...

...Not to mention that about 90 years ago, there was a major split within the church about the issue of war due to WWI, and before that there was another split during the American Civil War (many of the churches believed that slavery was worse than warfare.... After all, if you kill a man, it's over in a matter of moment, whereas slavery lasts a lifetime). My particular church ended up on the side that decided that military service should be at one's own discretion, but with suitable prayer and counsel taken first. I sincerely believe that God called me into military service for a purpose, and he brought me through it for the same reason... It wasn't an easy journey, but I learned much that has proven valuable over those 6 rough years....
 
Hikaro Takayama said:
Actually I'm in the Church of the Brethren, which split off the main Anabaptist movement about 300 years ago, and while I was in what was technically a combat capability, I felt that I wasn't violating the whole non-violence clause by the fact that what I worked on was a point-defense weapon whose purpose was to shoot down incoming missiles so that they wouldn't blow everyone else up... The system didn't have near enough range to hit the aircraft launching the missiles, but it didn't need it...
Click to expand...

So you were a Phalanx technician then. I can see your point, although is a situation similar to say the Falklands Conflict, the Phalanx would have been effective against the Argentine aircraft using dumb bombs.

Hikaro Takayama said:
...Not to mention that about 90 years ago, there was a major split within the church about the issue of war due to WWI, and before that there was another split during the American Civil War (many of the churches believed that slavery was worse than warfare.... After all, if you kill a man, it's over in a matter of moment, whereas slavery lasts a lifetime). My particular church ended up on the side that decided that military service should be at one's own discretion, but with suitable prayer and counsel taken first. I sincerely believe that God called me into military service for a purpose, and he brought me through it for the same reason... It wasn't an easy journey, but I learned much that has proven valuable over those 6 rough years....
Click to expand...

Hmm, I spent a fair amount of my seminary career arguing that War was far too important a matter to be left to the theologians and philosophers. One of the professors teaching ethics turned me loose on his class for one day to discuss why War exists from a practical standpoint. That lead to a quite lively class discussion. Now, most of my consulting is how to most efficiently destroy a target with the minimum amount of effort., although I do at times argue for the Piledriver to crack a Walnut approach.
 
timerover51 said:
Hmm, I spent a fair amount of my seminary career arguing that War was far too important a matter to be left to the theologians and philosophers.
Click to expand...

If you're talking about war as an ethical issue, it is surely too important a matter not to be left to the philosophers, since ethical issues are philosophical issues.

The mention of the Mennonite splits is interesting - rather parallels early Christianity, which went from being universally pacifist (to the extent that being a soldier was regarded as incompatible with being a Christian) to the more balanced view of Augustine (which was that war could be justified on moral grounds, but only in a very few cases) and ultimately, in the Middle Ages, to the view that war could be a holy duty. Such is human nature, I suppose.
 
That doesn't make being a pacifist a waste of time, unless you think that the sole purpose of being a pacifist is to bring an end to war. Perhaps the purpose is simply not to participate in something you think is immoral. The fact that other people continue to engage in that behaviour wouldn't invalidate your decision not to. You might as well say that choosing not to murder people is a waste of time since there will always be people who do murder people. Maybe so, but if I'm not doing it, that makes a big difference to me.

Anyway, I think further discussion of this kind of thing can go in the OT forum.
 
Yes, go to Plot's thread,a better place for that, unless we have an offiicial C&C Off-Topic thread approved :mischief:
 
Born and raised in southeastern Wisconsin (Milwaukee County). Currently 45 years old and feeling it most days, of course Midwest winters do not help.
Spent my youth serving my country as a Paratrooper. Originally I wanted to be an aviator, but the only offer I received was to fly choppers without a college degree, so I decided to jump out of them instead.
Went to school after the military and became a Paramedic. Worked for a private in Milwaukee then CFD (Chicago Fire Department), Denver Paramedic Division, and Mecklenburg EMS (Charlotte NC) with a working vacation in Lake Geneva. I injured my back on the job and was told it was a muscle strain. I continued working re-injuring my back for the next 14 years until it became so unstable I could no longer work. Interesting statistic I figured out in my spare time.........I responded to over 2.5 million 911 calls during my career.
Currently I am a full time student earning a degree in Graphic Design, with the hopes of getting a scholarship to MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design) after I complete my post secondary degree in design.
I had a short introduction to computers in high school, my school had a computer lab with a computer that took up half the room using punch cards and my parents bought a vic-20, commodore 64, and finally an Amiga. Re found computers after I could no longer work and learned how to build and use a PC. Currently I am on my fifth build an AMD Phenom quad core that is serving me quite well.
The first Civ game I purchased was C3 vanilla and fell in love with it. Stumbled across a mod called SoE and became enthralled with the possibilities of modding C3C. Generally I help out and make graphics by request for friends like el-j and blue lion. Although I have 2 unfinished scenario's that I still need units for. I probably am going to have to take the time and learn poser and make those units myself however.

10525130643577770676207.jpg


PS to everyone that says photo shop's pallet is backwards do you honestly believe that the designers used gimp?
 
Interesting story.... My one great-uncle was a Helicopter mechanic during Vietnam, and he also acted as the gunner on a number of medevac missions.... He told me that he could hear the enemy bullets ricocheting off the back of his armored chair. :eek: ....Not the kind of job I'd want in the military, thank you very much!

...and it's not just GIMP: Paint Shop Pro, 256Paint, Pedit and every other paint program EXCEPT Photoshop displays palettes the exact opposite way Photoshop does (Even Anamagician, an old 1994-era VGA animation program displayed the palette in-use like Paint Shop Pro does)...

...What the game designers used is irrelevant anyways: Most people can't afford Photoshop, and even those of us who can would rather get a program that costs less than half what Photoshop does (PsP) or can be had for FREE and that can do all the important things just as well as Photoshop (with the added benefit of not needing a 10,000 page manual just to figure out how to re-size an image) and spend the money saved on more important stuff (like saving up for a new car or a down-payment on a house).
 
10000 page manual? Are you talking about PS or 3dsmax? LOL!
 
Hikaro Takayama said:
...and it's not just GIMP: Paint Shop Pro, 256Paint, Pedit and every other paint program EXCEPT Photoshop displays palettes the exact opposite way Photoshop does (Even Anamagician, an old 1994-era VGA animation program displayed the palette in-use like Paint Shop Pro does)...
Click to expand...

Maybe because all those programs came later and in order to avoid copyright infringements changes had to be made.

Hikaro Takayama said:
...What the game designers used is irrelevant anyways: Most people can't afford Photoshop, and even those of us who can would rather get a program that costs less than half what Photoshop does (PsP) or can be had for FREE and that can do all the important things just as well as Photoshop (with the added benefit of not needing a 10,000 page manual just to figure out how to re-size an image) and spend the money saved on more important stuff (like saving up for a new car or a down-payment on a house).
Click to expand...
No it is completely relevant there is a reason Photoshop, Illustrator, and the other Adobe products are the industry standard.
If I could find a program with all the features offered by the Adobe line and I could have prints made directly from it's native file format I might consider buying it. Of course then the next problem occurs in the interface not being as useful and intuitive.
If you want a copy of a manual I'll send it to you it is less than 600 pages and nobody I know needs a manual to figure out how to resize an image it is mainly used as a reference when it comes to using channels correctly.
Please let me know where I can buy a new car or make a down payment on a house for $600. If all I had to do was resize an image I am sure gimp would work just fine, however if you need to do any commercial work in the print, web, or gaming industries you need something more capable. BTW I downloaded a new Photoshop plug-in from NVidia that allows me to open and save .dds format which a lot of new games use. I have not seen that capability for gimp or paintshop pro.
 
Again, I was slightly exaggering (but only slightly in the case of the manual)... FYI, I actually DO have Photoshop 7, which came as a surprise Freebie on the HP Invent that I bought off my one Friend for $50 because he was moving back to Japan... I tried it, and aside from very basic stuff, like re-sizing images and adding text, trying to do anything in Photoshop was a pain in the rear-end compared to Paint Shop Pro 7, and to add insult to injury, my version of PsP is JAPANESE, meaning that I can't even READ half of what the menu options are without breaking out a serious Kanji dictionary, yet I can still do more with it than Photoshop (and understand how to do stuff better).

Furthermore, unlike Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop is a HUGE drag on system resources: It actually slows my computer down more than POSER, and that's saying quite a lot (Poser being an extremely laggy, memory-intensive program).

#1 If I was going to throw $600+ around, I'd spend it on something actually useful and doesn't waste system resources, like AutoCAD, 3d Studio Max or Eagle CAD, which is FREE for non-commercial use, (the two CAD programs which would be much more useful in my line of work, what with the built-in circuit templates they have) or two new computers (yes I can build a decent computer for about $300... The Portable Analytical Teletype cost me $350 to build and most of the overrun was due to costs involved with hiring my uncle's machine shop to mill out the inside of the case as well as other assorted case hardware purchases.)

....And as for converting any given obscure, rarely-used file format into a more common form, I've found that I can find Open Source apps for that kind of stuff... I.e. VLC to convert Amiga MOD files into WAV or MP3s, Open Office to convert Lotus Works into Excel spreadsheets, or, to get back to your example, DDS Converter to convert DDS files into TGA, JPG, PNG, BMP or PSD formats. As a matter of fact, I actually downloaded and use the DDS converter for tweaking/modifying images from Age of Empires III (Civ III aint the only game that I mod).

As for making prints from a file's native format.... GIMP, PsP, MS-Paint and Windows Photo and Fax viewer work just fine at printing from a file's native format with my OfficeJet 4500 printer, so I don't know what you think is so great about that. :dunno:

The one and only advantage I can see with Photoshop is that you can use any make, model and type of scanner without installing drivers, but again, I can just go to the scanner's manufacturer's website (as in the case of the CanonScan N1240 scanner that I also bought off the same friend who I got the HP computer from) and download them for free...

IOW, as far as I'm concerned, it's just not worth the money... If you have some business that ABSOLUTELY requires Photoshop, then yeah, it MIGHT be worth the $600+ dollars you pay for it, but I don't see what the big deal is otherwise...

Personally, I have much better things to spend my money on, like more Poser add-ons, hardware (both the computer as well as the nuts, bolts and sheet metal type), LEGOs and Mad Science electronics supplies...

My one old navy buddy out in Phoenix thinks the Adobe software suite that he and his wife use for their college classes are the best thing since sliced bread, I think that they're all over-priced, over-rated and too frustrating to use, and would rather use my Open-source software, which is FREE (usually both as in "Free Speech" AND "Free Beer"), easy to use, and easy to modify (the source code IS available, after all)... About the only Adobe software I'd ever consider using would be Adobe After-Effects, since it seems to be the easiest to use video editing software available (although it is still over-priced)....

You're free to think Photoshop is the greatest thing ever, but you'll never be able to convince ME of that, because I know better from experience!
 
[offtopic]
This thread is about people, not a Photoshop-war.
 
Ok, sorry about that....

Anyways, as promised, here's a fairly recent picture of myself:



This was taken in August 2009 in the Presidential Car on the Historical Strasburg Railroad.... It was my first visit to Lancaster county in over 10 years, and I enjoyed every minute of it!
 
Get a haircut, you ungrateful hippy. Also, your goggles are far too small.

Just kidding, of course. Well, not about the goggles.
 
Kyriakos said:
I guess you are part of the steampunk mod team :)
Click to expand...

Well, yeah, but I'm into steampunk in general....

@Goldflash: Those goggles are genuine WWII-vintage Russian goggles (probably the type used by Tank drivers or Motorcycle troops)....

EDIT: Unless I'm working on something dirty/grimy or that would otherwise mess nice clothes up, that is actually how I dress most of the time (well, except for the goggles... Those are for special occasions). Even when at work, I tend to wear button-up work shirts and canvas work pants with an Irish cap or Newsboy cap variant (i.e. like a 19th century factory worker).

...Which is kind of funny because while I like to dress up fancy (I wore that same exact pleated-front dress shirt and large bow tie, but with a black, pinstriped vest when I went to meet the girlfriend's parents last Saturday), my girlfriend tends to prefer Converse canvas sneakers, jeans, T-shirts and hoodies/zip-up sweaters and rarely ever gets "fancied up".... :lol:
 
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