Hello there!
My name is Andrei (Andrew in english). I just turned 32 almost a week ago.
My late father introduced me to electronics at a very young age. I was 7 when i made from scratch my first AM radio. The computer bug i caught when i was about 10. My mom got me and my brother a Spectrum compatible computer, made right here in Romania. Man, we've spent hours upon hours in front of that thing programming in Basic and trying out games. A short while after getting this, i saw one at a friend's place that had a floppy drive. No more tape loading crap. But the fdd controller was so expensive, we couldn't afford one. So i managed to get my hands on a malfunctioning one which i brought back to life in a couple of weeks. We used that computer for about 2 years. PCs were making their entrance on the market at that time here, and i really wanted one of those. Especially for getting some sound besides blips and blops, some decent games, Doom was first on my list. I managed to get my hands on an AMD 80386 running at a whopping 25 MHz. I had to return it in dissapointment to the guy i got it from, because what i was making as a "junior tv repairman" (i was 14), wasn't enough to pay for the darn thing. But lucky me, a friend of my parents gave me and my brother a Macintosh SE 30.
That was my first Mac. And i have never looked at another "chinese mis(t)ery box" as i call the pc. I've had an Amiga a few years ago but i sold it because i couldn't find anything for it here in Romania. I still have my trusty SGI O2 though. I have had many other pc computers over the years, but only as secondary machines i could use for BeOS. I have made some interesting things for and with that OS. I even had a distro similar to Max, but which really worked, unlike Max that crashed because of some bad software or scrambled libraries.
Anyway, believe it or not, my current job is as a translator. I translate technical documentation from romanian to english and viceversa for an oilfield equipment manufacturer here.
I still work electronics, revive old computers that i find, but only in my spare time which isn't much these days. My wife works as an english teacher.
I do like to play some games on my consoles from time to time. My favourite console of all times, is and will always be the Nintendo 64. Don't ask me why i love the darn thing so much, but i do. Maybe because i worked my ass off as a teenager to be able to get a second-hand one.
I was even thinking about trying to do some stuff on the SGI O2 since i have the N64 SDK.
My real second job is at home, doing computer repairs (99.9% of them are windblows pcs) and also console repairs. If i didn't do this, it would be impossible for us to pay even the bills since jobs are paid shit here in my country.
Well i hope i didn't bore you to death.
Best wishes from Romania
Andrei
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