Stack Overflow and Other Computer Stacks

I have been using SO since it started. I was unregistered for a long while and am rather annoyed that I have lost all the information that went with my unregistered login (I assume it's kept in a cookie which I accidentally wiped trying to get my unregistered account registered).

I code in C# mostly but have dabbled with Python, Ruby, Lisp and PHP. I'm nowhere near an expert with anything. I'm pretty good with SQL for SQL Server.

I know a hawk from a handsaw but only when the wind is southerly.

This is also me: http://stackoverflow.com/users/261178/bert

But I have no way to prove that.

Writing, Role Playing and Board Games

I started out writing when I was about ten and a teacher gave me an exercise book to direct my overactive imagination and hopefully tame my awful calligraphic skills. One out of two, I suppose, isn't bad. My imagination has been directed but my handwriting remains appalling to this day quarter of a century hence.

At first I wrote what people write, genre novels, trying to make something I would be proud of, a dark fantasy novel to capture the imagination filled with relatable characters and new ideas. After producing a heap of badly written generic tripe with wooden characters, appalling dialogue and wonky plotted garbage I finally fixed the dialogue in the first novel I wrote that doesn't make me blush with shame Hidden Predators, Dangerous Prey.

After that I noodled around trying to make something a publishing house might want to publish before realising my chances of a satisfying career as a writer were about as good as my chances of winning the lottery four weeks straight.

Thereafter I got involved in the murky world of self-publishing and it was a short leap from there to the design of RPGs and other such ephemera.

Check out my work (and that of our team) at www.nodicerpg.com and my creative blog at leostableford.blogspot.com