In a drastic change from the normal tenor of this rarely-used blog, I'm making a post about my life. Don't worry, angry atheist/communist rants will be back shortly. :P

Anyway, I've managed to get myself a real job for the last year of my degree. And by "real job", I specifically don't mean selling people groceries. I did that in high school, and quit near the end of last year (So I could do an internship at DSTO, rather than because I was sick of it.), so by now I'm rather over the concept.

Thankfully, it seems by now I've got enough experience and good enough references that I've managed to land myself a cadetship at BAE Systems - they have an Adelaide office. I'll be working there on a casual basis for the last year of my degree. If they like my work (and assuming I do actually get my degree - this is a fair assumption) they'll probably offer me a graduate position.

So I'm reasonably happy with the way my life is going.

Probably the upshot of this whole post is that I've got a lot to thank BYOND for. Having been fiddling with DM for four years or so before I started my degree - even if it was on a reasonably simplistic level - gave me a massive head start. Not just because I already understood concepts like loops or variables or procedures - more because it led me to understand hashtables, object-orientated programming, recursion, and above all, algorithms. BYOND, being so abstracted from the actual computer, is an excellent teaching tool, among its other properties.

Sure, we may get annoyed at the idiots running around the forums from time to time, but be careful - some of them might just be cluey enough to learn from the language.

Thanks, BYOND. And thanks, Dantom.