As a child I was, for a time, fascinated with computers. I even briefly entertained the idea that I would write a game in BASIC. The hours it took me to draw a slightly skewed line across the 16 color monitor of my Atari 800XL dispelled that notion almost as quickly as my prepubescent brain had latched on to it. Fast forward to college and while not a CS major, pursuing a Mathematics degree involved some logic and programming courses. When I say "pursuing" I mean barely attending classes and eventually dropping out completely to instead hitchhike across the continental US with all my belongings on my back and only a vague idea of where I was going. The bits of pascal and logic I did study did not stick with me except as a faint memory. Fast forward 8 years to 1998 and I have a wonderful daughter, a quaint middle management job at a box factory, and a renewed interest in the surging home computer phenomenon going on at the time. So with a brand new Windows 98 machine and a copy of Deitel and Deitel's C++ programming purchased for 10 bucks at a garage sale I set out to learn to write software during lunch breaks and late evening hacking sessions.