My first encounter with PC was in May 1987. The personal computers just started to appear in Russia. One of my friends had a PC XT at work and invited me after hours to play the games. I was left alone with the PC and after half an hour playing, when the game suddenly quitted, because I did hit some wrong key, I had no idea what to do!
Half a year later I took an additional job as a computer teacher at the computer courses, which started to pop up in Moscow here and there.
In the beginning of 1990 I became a chief of the small computer group in the Accounting Department at ZIL - the big truck plant in Moscow. My another after hours job was a computer consultant for Moscow office of Sandvik - famous Swedish company which produced tools. For the money I earned there, I was able to buy my first own PC in 1991, with 12 MHz 286 processor and 104 MB hard drive. I had to install the steel door in our apartment and always remember to close the window when PC works, so its sounds could not get away :). Considering that the price of the PC was an equivalent of probably my 3-year salary, that was the wise thing to do.
October 30, 1994 we arrived to Halifax, Nova Scotia with 11-year kid, three bags and a suitcase. The next day (Halloween!) we went for a walk in the city, and noticed strange things - skeletons, ghosts, giant spiders and other scary stuff were everywhere! Witches, Draculas, vampires, goblins, and dead bodies just out of the grave were meeting us on every corner. Imagine the reaction of the people who (so far) knew about Halloween only that such a holiday exists!
Going to Canada, we prepared for difficulties (well, after 38 years of life in Soviet Union I doubt that any kind of difficulties could scare us :) But everything was much easier than we thought it would be. In two month I found my first job and was busy ever since. I worked as Independent Consultant for three years. Several projects, I worked on, were for Martime Life Assurance Co, and finally I joined Maritime Life as Systems Analyst.
In October 1996 I discovered Universal Thread, where I can be found almost any time of day (or night :) now. Next year I became UT Sysop and then UT Consultant. UT is a wonderful place to be! Among other things like meeting people and getting friends, UT also gave me the possibility to become Microsoft MVP. Visual FoxPro is not only a tool I use at work (I have to work with other products too) but also one of my hobbies. Since I work for a big corporation, it is not always possible to apply at work all the exciting new stuff in VFP (like new features for Web applications, XML, COM, etc.) Most of the new stuff I do at home, just for fun. The results are my articles in FoxPro Advisor, VFP classes and utilities in UT Downloads section, and recently the DevCon speaker experience.
My other hobbies are flying the glider at Stanley airfield (see http://www.geocities.com/redfoxpro/aviation/ ), photography (see our family website about Maritimes nature at http://come.to/binturong ), railroad modeling, airgun shooting. Oh, yeah, and all that house work, since we bought a house last year. :)
