Freedom CD Questionnaire

Handle: Aquatic Nuisance
Name: Ryan Mahoney
Age: 18
Affiliations: The Coteric Continuum
Location: Brighton, MI - USA
Address: ryan.mahoney@tssbbs.com

Describe yourself:
I am a very logical-minded perfectionistic individual.  I suppose that has
a lot to do with my obsession with computers.  I tend to notice details
about things that most people can't even notice when it is pointed out to
them.  I tend to keep somewhat to myself when with people who don't think
like I do, but I really enjoy talking and interacting with other intelligent
people.  In addition to my overall tendency toward computers, I also really
enjoy doing things outdoors - especially in the summer.  I love to water ski,
go for bike rides, and other fun things.  For money, I work part time as a
computer technician for a local computer store.  Our first 4k intro, in fact,
is a BBS ad for that computer store's BBS.  (and no, I didn't make any money
from that.)  Working on computers is infinitely more enjoyable than, say,
flipping burgers; but I'd rather be programming for money than working on
nasty, toasted, obsolete computers.  I have run a BBS - Sound Bytes - for
about three years now, and being a sysop is getting old now that the callers
in the area are little more than d00dz that care about nothing other than
their precious online games.

Education:
13 years of the finest public education that Brighton has to offer.  I'll be
studying computer science at Michigan Tech starting this fall.  Of course,
where computers are involved, I've learned almost all of it on my own.  They
just can't teach logical thinking in school.  And they certainly didn't offer
any assembly language classes.  Heh, the top of the computer division at my
high school was a class oxymoronically named "Advanced Basic".  And, because
of the school's computer class requirement, I was forced to take that
pathetic class.  The big project of the class was to write this really simple
database program, and since it was so boring, I spiced my nice GWBASIC
program up with spinning cursors, arrow-key support, and all sorts of things
that we weren't "supposed" to do.  Oh, well - it was a time to relax after
chemistry.

Hobbies:
Computers, computers, assembly language programming, music, electronics,
water skiing, bike riding, computers

Favorite TV show(s): Star Trek:TNG, ST:Voyager

Cool movie(s): ST:Generations, Apollo 13, The River Wild

If you could have THREE wishes, they would be:
1) that all the stupid people who think that Windoze *is* their computer
would just go back to using typewriters and stop negatively influencing
the PC scene
2) I wish that I would have won a Freedom CD in MC3 <hehe>
3) mov [numwishes],0FFFFh    ;of course! :-)

Career Plans (what do you want to do):
Well, I'd love to use the things I learn at college combined with all of the
things that I learn by doing so much with the demo scene to get a coding job
with a "cool" company - it'd be cool to design the software for the latest
sound card from Advanced Gravis <g> since that has a lot to do with coding
*and* music.

Craziest/Stupidest thing you have ever done:
Well, one day I was transporting my computer system somewhere to work on a
programming project.  I had just bought a UPS for the computer, and I had
that in the car as well.  It occurred to me that I had about a half-hour that
I could use the computer in the car, so I hooked up my GUS to the car stereo
and played some S3M files.  It was rather pointless, but a cool thing to do
anyway. :)

Good advice for others:
When you lame code from tutorials, released source, etc. -- make sure you
know _what_ the code is doing and recode it yourself for your project.  You
get so much more out of that than just copying blocks of code from other
people's work.

Something OTHERS should know:
I've never been to a demo party :(  But I would desperately love to attend
one as soon as possible.

Computer(s) owned: ■ Homebuilt i486DX2-66
540 MB Western Digital hard drive
450 MB Western Digital hard drive
8 Megabytes RAM
5¼" and 3½" high density Teac floppies
Trident VLB SVGA card w/1MB (yuk! - getting a ET4000
Sony Multiscan monitor              series card soon)
Honeywell extended keyboard
Microsoft serial mouse 2.0a
Gravis Ultrasound with 1MB RAM
Sound Blaster Pro
Infotel 14.4K Internal FaxModem
Zoom 2400/9600 FaxModem
WatchIt! TV capture board
Conner 250M tape drive
Iomega ZIP-100 drive
Sony IDE 2x CD drive
Canon BJC-600e color printer
(soon to take parts from this beast and build a P90)
Commodore 128
Convergent Technologies Workslate
Macintrash LC

Soundcard(s) owned: 1 meg GUS revision 3.7
Sound Blaster Pro

Music you like to listen to: classic rock, modern rock, tracked music,
They Might Be Giants, lots of other stuff

Music education (for musician only):
I learned a lot just playing with keyboards on my own, plus seven years of
"formal" music training in the school's music program.  I play saxophone in
school bands, and have an old Yamaha keyboard that I use mainly now to get
ideas for tracker music.

Music style (for musician only):
I don't know if I have any definitive style, but I tend to be less oriented
toward the hard-core "techno" music and more toward orchestral music.

Favorite Utilities/Programs: Norton Commander
Norton Utilities
TASM
Aurora text editor
QEMM / Desqview
Telemate
Scream Tracker 3
Cool Wave Edit

Favorite demo(s):  Verses, Second Reality, Heartquake

Favorite intro(s): TSSBBS.COM, ASM-94_2.EXE

Favorite tracker music(s):
It's so hard to pick favorites, especially since I don't have the FTP access
to be able to get and listen to all the great new stuff that's been coming
out. At the risk of sounding lame, I'm not going to choose any favorites
because of my limited selection.

Project(s) planned:
We've been working on a GUS S3M player, and now that it is in a usable form,
we can start making real intros and such.  This last year has been an
experimenting and learning stage, and all the work is finally paying off - we
just released a 4k intro with adlib music, and it is so nice to make a real
production without any ripped code or libraries.

What you hope to accomplish in the Demo Scene:
Unfortunately, we got into the scene a year or two late, so even as we
rapidly learn things, we're still always "behind" what's going on.  Goals for
the near future include such things as learning the secrets behind protected
mode, releasing some decent intros, and attending a demo party.  Ultimately,
it would be nice to progress far enough to be recognized as a serious demo
group and assemble a "megademo" or two :)  But that still seems a little bit
in the future for now.  Personally, I'd like to take the time to do some
really serious music composition and perhaps release a musicdisk.  Who knows,
there are so many directions that we can still go, but I do want to stay very
active in the demo scene in as many ways as possible.

What missing from the demo scene:
I have only heard of maybe 2 girls in the whole stinkin' demo scene.  A few
female coders would be nice...  I've also noticed that c.s.i.p.d doesn't
contain as much traffic as it would seem like there should be.  Aside from
IRC and such, is the demo scene conversing elsewhere, or is there really not
that much inter-group discussion?  The parties are nice and all, but it seems
like there's so much competition that there's not enough cooperation.  Now
that DemoNews is back, I can't complain about it being missing - I was very
sad to see it go, and I'm happy to witness its reincarnation.  Other than
that, the only other thing that I can think of that is missing from the scene
is *us*.  The Coteric Continuum is rather isolated here in Michigan, and
other than e-mail and c.s.i.p.d, we have no way to reach out of here.  Once
college rolls around and we have the ability to FTP and use IRC, we'll
finally be able to actually release things beyond the borders of our cheesy
little community.

Demo Scene 10 years from now:
This is hard to say, since the scene as we know it hasn't really been in
place for 10 years.  No matter how much GUI they throw at us, there will
still be a group of people who realize that instead of "increasing your
productivity", high-level GUIs really limit what can be done with the
computer.  These logical-minded people are the core of the demo scene; and
although the uninformed masses may drift ever farther from our ideals, the
demo scene will still exist.  It is so hard to even think of what computers
in general will be like 10 years into the future.

PC in the near future:
Ugh.  August 24th will mark a dark day in the PC's history.  Microsoft's
latest scheme to moronify the computer is going to, unfortunately, hit it
big with the people who look at a computer as a business tool instead of
a computer.  After seeing a beta copy of this nasty Windoze '95, I am scared
for the future of the PC.  They are trying to make computers function in a
metaphorical matter that makes sense to the average Joe, but that does no
good to demo coders, who tend to think more like computers than like people.

How can people contact you:
Mail can be sent to ryan.mahoney@tssbbs.com for now, but I will be getting a
college address soon.  As soon as it is known, I'll put it in anything we
happen to release.  Remember, I always love to get mail!  I religiously
monitor c.s.i.p.d, as well.