I saw this thread, but for some reason it just never clicked to actually post in it. I guess that's my anti-social behaviour showing even on the net.

My name is Brett, I'm 24 and I'm an alchoholic.
(crowd): "Hi Brett"

nah just kidding :roll:
I don't drink alcohol or smoke cigs or take any drugs more potent than panadol (no wonder I'm so bored all the time ).

My first experience in programming (not counting some funky osbourne keyboard thing a mate owned, you plug it into a TV and type stuff in and try to catch boxes with other, bigger boxes) was in high school PCM (practical computer methods: actually a word processing class). Messing around with the computer I found it had QBasic and subsiquently added a third snake to nibbles and made the gorillas do the mexican wave. I couldn't do much more than cut & paste and change variables tho.

Then we were taught Pascal in IPT (information processing & technology) and that opened up a whole new world. I managed to talk my teacher into lending me a copy of TP7 (don't tell borland) so I could experiment at home (classes were pretty limited and the techer spent most of his time attending to the less interested).

The first (not 'hello world') program I ever made was a computer ATM (electronic bank) that would read a PIN and balance from a floppy disk. You could withdraw & deposit and all kinds of stuff. I was pretty impressed with it. The first game I ever finished was a turn based text flight sim. Sounds strange I guess, but it worked. I even made a nice crashing scene when you got shot down (a stick plane moving 45A¬? into the ground and exploding into red & yellow pixels). I was pretty proud of that too.

After a short while I found my lack of knowledge too limiting & the help too unhelpful (it explained things like you should already know it). The town I was in hadn't even heard of the internet yet & I couldn't afford books so I more or less shelved the programming until about 4 or 5 months ago when I first discovered Delphi existed. I got version 7 and haven't stopped since then.

Wow, wasn't expecting this to be that long. If you've made it this far you have my sympathy.

I was born in Queensland but moved to Perth in Oct last year. My shoe size is 12, my slipper size isn't. I prefer turn-based strategy games (because I can eat & play, or just go do something halfway through a game and not worry about saving it or dying), so Age of Wonders is awesome for more than just the Delphi connection. The most common mistakes I make in pascal are typing 'endl' instead of 'end;' and 'being' instead of 'begin'. It's phenominal the amount of times I do that, I would say at least 60-70% of the time.

That'll do I think.