Freedom CD Questionnaire

Handle: DAN, the Math+(Man)²
Name: Daniel Laursen
Age: 18
Affiliations: the Coteric Continuum (a budding demo group)
Location: Michigan, USA (Howell at home, Houghton at college)

Describe yourself: I'm a perfectionist.  I'm anti-social.  I'm a programmer.
Logic and structure run through my veins.  I've always
tried to vent my logical nature through whatever I could.
First it was mathematics, then electronics, now computers.
It would be nice to blend all three of them together for an
ultimate exercise.

Education: From kindergarten through the 8th grade I went to a small private
school, from 9th through 12th I went to Howell High School.
I'm entering college (Michigan Technological University) in the
fall of 1995.  Almost all of my computer knowledge has been
entirely self-taught, of course.

Hobbies: Programming.  Anything that has to do with computers.  (With
mathematics and electronic stuff on the side.)

Favorite book(s): Assembly language books of all kinds

Favorite TV show(s): Star Trek: The Next Generation, DS9, Voyager

Cool movie(s): ST: Generations, Disney feature animated movies.  I view all
such Disney movies like I view demos.  I watch the animation
and listen to the music and think of them in that context.

If you could have THREE wishes, they would be:
1. I would like unbridled technical/programming/sourcecode specifications
for any piece of hardware/software that I would want.
2. Unlimited cash flow as long as it was dedicated to buying only computer
things.  Life would be boring if you could have everything.  But, when I
want something for my computer, I want something for my computer.
3. To find a girl coder. ;)

4. And if I could have a fourth wish...  I wish everything in the USA were
metric.  I really really hate the stupid American systems of measure.
Fahrenheit.. yuck.  (Of course, Metric is decimal-based.  Too bad there
isn't a Hextric which is base 16! <g>)

What the future holds: I want to be a programmer forever, I would hope.  Of
what flavor I have no idea.  I want to learn everything
I can about programming at extremely low levels (COPY
CON PROGRAM.COM, ya know...<g>).  I hope the future
holds more demo-related stuff for me.

Career Plans (what do you want to do): Uh..  I want to make money, of course,
but I don't want to write inefficient
Windows programs for insurance
companies or something like that if I
don't have to.  It would be nice to
code for a company that requires low
level coding or coding that requires
original/artistic expressiveness in
programming.

Biggest disappointment in life: That most people are actually pretty stupid.
The technophobes and the Windows lovers scare
me.  Another disappointment: that COMMAND.COM
in Windows 95 is actually an .EXE file.

Stupidest thing you have ever done: One time I pulled a Sound Blaster out of
the computer while it was on.  The
computer shut off, but there was no
damage.  I then said, "Oh..  I probably
shouldn't have done that." Another time I
rode my bicycle into traffic and hit a
car.  That was pretty dumb.

Good advice for others: Become a programmer.  Unless, of course, you don't
want to...

Computer(s) owned: Well, at this very second I have a 486DX2/66 VLB with a
nice fast Trident VLB card (ha!) and a 340 MB HD.  By the
time anybody reads this I plan to have a P90 with a PCI
ET4000W32p-based video card and a 1 gig HD.

Soundcard(s) owned: A Sound Blaster AWE32 and a GUS ACE 512k (soon to upgrade
to 1MB).  I love the GUS.  It's just too cool.  The AWE is
nice too.  If only there were an SDK for it as cool as the
GUS SDK.  Yeah, right.  Too bad the GUS doesn't have a
cheap FM chip on it or something.  The Adlib is cool.
It's fun to make Adlib music <g>.

Music you like listen to: Module/tracked music, They Might Be Giants,
Soundtracks to movies

Favorite Utilities/Programs: Norton Commander.  It's the best.  I also love
the Aurora text editor.  DESQview and QEMM are
nice.  Oh!  TASM... can't forget TASM.  (And all
other cool Borland programming languages).

Favorite demo(s): Verses, Second Reality, Heartquake, CD2

Favorite intro(s): STARPORT, TSSBBS.COM (by us!), STONED.COM, HAPPIJOY.COM

Favorite tracker music(s): Almost all songs by Purple Motion and Skaven; the
song contained in Verses.

Project(s) planned: A demo soon, I hope.  At least a big intro, anyway.  As we
develop more of our own demo-related code, we'll be able
to start producing things more easily.  We're still
working on making a sound engine.  Graphic effects are
easy -- we have many of those, we just can't put them to
music quite yet.

What you hope to accomplish in the Demo Scene: Become known.  Release
something that competes in the
slightest way.

How can people contact you: This is difficult because my email address will
change very near the date this is released.  I
don't know my new email address yet.  The current
one is daniel.laursen@tssbbs.com.  You can send
mail there and hopefully I'll still check on that
account.