Since there were some calls for introductions, I figure I should actually do mine (even though I've already made 185 posts :-[ ) I warn you that it is long and contains much which is spurious and unnecessary.
I'm originally from Canada (Winnipeg and Ottawa, but my entire family is now on Vancouver Island). I'm a programmer by trade. One day I decided to learn French (because I needed it in Ottawa and I also had a Francophone girlfriend). However, I took something like 13 years of French in school and emerged without being able to even order a drink at Macdonald's. This despite the fact that my parents *and* younger brother were fluent in French and they spoke French at home. I figured I was just stupid about languages. However, being a programmer, one thing I learned was that if you can't solve a problem, sometimes it helps to try solve a similar problem just to see where you get stuck. So I decided to learn Japanese (almost completely randomly).
There was a problem with me learning Japanese (apart from attempting to do it using the same techniques that failed me with French). I'm a programmer by trade and usually we tend to work 16 hour days. I had no time to learn Japanese. I decided that what I should probably do is try to find a job where learning Japanese was part of the job. That way I could kill 2 birds with 1 stone (strangely in Chinese and Japanse: 一石二鳥 which is literally "1 stone 2 birds"). I happened to meet someone at a conference who had previously been on the JET programme (a government exchange teaching programme where you go and teach English in Japanese schools). He recommended that I apply. The cutoff in age was 40 (it's a youth oriented scheme) and I was just turning 39, so perfect timing!
They accepted me (who can resist a letter of recommendation that reads, "To the best of my knowledge Mike is not an axe murder") and so I quit my programming job and went off to Japan for a year. ...Because a year is obviously more than enough to learn how to speak a foreign language... Seriously, how hard can it be? 130 million Japanese people speak Japanese and some of them are probably really stupid. Also my Francophone girlfriend had left me to go travelling around the world (and I didn't go because I *hate* traveling... and so obviously I went to Japan instead).
Well, I got to Japan and within a month I thought, "Wow. This is so amazingly amazing, I think I'm going to steal it". Wait... no... that wasn't me. No, I thought, "This is so amazingly amazing, I think I'm going to stay here forever". So I sold my house in Canada (by phone --- that was fun) and I taught English in a local high school for 5 years. ...Because as it turns out, it takes *more than a year* to learn a foreign language. Who knew? In the process, I met my wife and got married. And then we went to the UK for 2 years because it turns out my wife *loves* traveling. Sigh... In the process, I got back into the programming gig. I convinced my wife to go back to Japan and I ended up doing contract work for UK companies remotely in Japan.
But there is a problem with Japan. From the age of 18 I had always made my own beer. Pretty much every single week for something like 21 years I made beer. However, it turns out that in Japan it is illegal to make beer at home (well, you are allowed to make 1 litre and then you can't make any more until you drink that 1 litre). I needed a hobby to replace brewing and decided to make cheese. This was because for the previous 10 years I was vegan (I forgot to mention that), but my wife is not vegan, so in addition to traveling I became a non-vegan. So I needed *lots of cheese*. Immediately. I'm sure you can understand.
And that's pretty much the story of my life. よろしくお願いします！ (Which, in Japanese means "Please don't kill me!"... err... I mean "Please treat me well, as I will you").
Nice to hear the back story! What type of programming do you do? I used to do some coding professionally ... still dabble occasionally for fun.
Mike--Thanks for checking in here! So interesting to hear tidbits of Japan. I was introduced to some of Japanese culture at an early age...our next door neighbor was from Japan, and later on our family hosted a foreign exchange student from Japan. We experienced such great culinary experiences...tempura, sukiyaki (sp?), nori snacks come to mind.
Looking forward to hearing more of your cheese adventures (I had no idea it was illegal to home brew beer in Japan, but making cheese should occupy your time and energy quite well, I would think).
Susan
@awakephd I've done pretty much all kinds of programming in my career. I started out working for the local University using an obscure language called FORTH. Then I worked in a healthcare startup doing C/C++ (we built a mobile, wireless patient information system in the early 90s!), then I worked in telecom on big telephone switches, and then I worked for Corel on Wordperfect and then a few Voice over IP startups. Now I do mostly Ruby and Javascript development building an internal sales web application for a travel tour company. I'm slowly trying to transition to working on my own game written in Rust (I have a 5 year plan to break away from the "man" ;-) ). To be honest, though, if it were an option for me I think I would try to go back to my roots and try to get a job as a programmer in a university research team. That was probably the best job I ever had. That team was crazy though -- the stores manager was a guy who quit his PhD because he argued to much with his supervisor. He just spent his time doing whatever... He famously rebuilt the particle accelerator that had been botched by another team and when I was there, he was building an electron microscope out of spare parts. Unfortunately I live out in the countryside, far away from any university, so it's not possible (at least for now).
@Susan38 I really enjoy Japanese culture for some reason. People often say that I must have been Japanese in a previous life because I tend towards Japanese attitudes (although, to be honest I don't think I could work for Japanese company -- I'm far too outspoken). I've always been a "rule follower" and that tends to work well in Japan. Lots of people break the law and brew beer anyway, but I don't feel comfortable with that. Ha ha! Pretty crazy, but it's the way I'm put together. One of the nice things about transitioning from beer to cheese is that cheese is actually a lot more interesting (so far anyway -- I know an *awful lot* about beer... so it might be that the excitement of learning something new is clouding my judgement ;-) ).
FORTH! That's a blast from the past - haven't even thought about that language in a long time. I never used it on a project, so only know the gist of it, not the ins and outs of actual usage. I've done a lot of C/C++, and still do a lot of the latter. A lot of database development; once upon a time it was in the old dBase / FoxBase semi-language for microcomputers, but for many years it has been SQL on a C++ platform. Never used Ruby or Javascript, though I've glanced over their design. I've not done even that for Rust - heard of it, but nothing more. Most recently, I've done a good bit of coding (?) in OpenSCAD -- not sure that I would exactly describe that as programming, but it is close. The most I've done on web development is a little bit of CSS / HTML, just enough to throw a simple website together.
Probably my greatest love, though, is working on embedded systems. I cut my teeth doing a lot of assembler - I was an undergraduate, working in a university research lab, figuring out how to connect an Apple II (yes, my roots go back to those days) to a primitive video digitizer. Not only had to use assembler to keep up with the scan rate and process the data, but also had to build the interface card to connect two things together that had never actually been intended to be connected together. :) I also did a couple of projects on the early IBM XT that included some assembly code as the back end for a BASIC front end UI. Recently I've been doing a lot of playing with Arduino, ESP32, and other microcontrollers, building a 3d printer, working on a CNC mill, etc. - wow, have things changed since those early days of assembler on the 6502 and 8088 ... !
That's really cool. It seems you were a little bit ahead of me as I did all my Apple II work in junior high school and high school. That was probably the last time I did hardware (built a music board -- acid washed board and everything ;-) ).
BTW, if you like doing embedded work, I *highly* recommend taking a look at Rust. Memory allocation and assignment is *very* different in Rust. If you have a statement like "a = b", you can no longer use "b" because "a" now "owns" the memory. You can "borrow" the memory and promise to give it back. Rust has something called a "borrow checker" that ensures that you are borrowing the memory responsibly (for example, you can have as many variables as you want borrowing memory as long as they don't modify it. As soon as something needs to modify the memory, it needs exclusive access). Anyway, to describe it properly, I'd need to practically write a book, so I'll leave it at that. If you ever used C++ in an RAII (resource aquisition is initialisation) way, it will be familiar. It takes some getting used to as it's really on steroids, but it gives you crazy amount of control over memory and guarantees safety.
Interesting. I don't know when I'll add Rust to my list ... though rust (little r) certainly keeps making an appearance, both literally and figuratively!