A.R. Van Halleorg

I don’t usually tend to write things from my point of view all that often. I’m sure I’ve done it a bit while blogging, but I’m trying to pull away from that.

I guess you clicked on this to get some information about me, heck if I know why, but I’ll gladly tell you more about myself, since I do tend to like to know more about the person I’m reading an opinion from.

The main interests in my life would be the following : Writing, History, Web Programming

Writing

The writing portion of my interests began first at age 6 when I discovered what a library was and found myself drawn to the stories and beginning to see pictures in my mind of other stories that I wanted to be able to tell people. At age 7, they introduced us to writing small, 1 page, stories and the interest peaked further. Finally, at age 8, in a new province, new life, new friends, I had a teacher who decided that it would be interesting for us to meet a real life editor. And boy was it! I remember being totally in awe of being in the presence of a person who got to read the stories I loved before everyone else and even had a hand in helping to mould them into the flowing works of art that they felt like to me. She was there to help us learn to write our stories properly, and I was excited, because that meant she would get to read my story too. Sadly, I found out that my writing was too well done to be seen (I had learned English when we moved over from Germany only a few years earlier and had been a fanatic about learning new words and how they were spelled), so I of course tried the only thing my little mind could at the time. Fake illiteracy. How I got there so quickly, I’m uncertain, but there I sat, with a dictionary, purposely trying to write it out half-phonetically to make it sound like the word, but not look like it. My teacher did not approve when she read my writing, and was disappointed that I did that, but the editor saw it and decided she’d look at my story if I gave her the well-spelled version. After the long discussion that followed, I was thoroughly interested in becoming an editor/writer, just to be able to create writing.

History

For the history, I had no background in it before the age of 12. At that point, we had a teacher who stood before us, had us look over the pictures in the first chapter of the history book, and asked if anything looked similar to things we see in modern day. Stones smacking together to make fire, sharpened stone and bone for spearheads and arrows, cave paintings, the pyramids, the pharaohs, etc etc. And there it began. Like a whole new land to discovery, the images began to piece themselves together and the images in my mind began to move like a film. Imagine! A world entirely unlike the one we know, a world that feels like fiction, but was everything we descended from now! The discoveries of the roots of all things modern. History class was so different to me from other classes. This wasn’t a chore to learn. This was like sitting down with someone telling an amazing story that you could add more to as the years go on. This was like visiting an ancient world without actually being there. I can only imagine that those places are a thousand times more impressive when you see them as the ruins they are now. How boring would it have been though if we’d lived then though? Just another day in the life.

Programming

Programming I decided on for a very practical reason. As someone who’s very into history and details, generally one’s memory is suited to storing details. Regardless of understanding, the storage capacity is there. What I really wanted more than anything was to become a doctor, because I could save lives, because I was capable of pursuing the education with the grades I had. But what if it turned out that I didn’t like it as much as I’d hoped? What would I do 5 years through medical education and discover I’d be miserable? I needed a fallback plan. In came programming. Something that was introduced to me at about 15 years of age at school in a small class about HTML. I didn’t know anything else about computers, but I knew HTML from the little I interacted with them. After high school I took time off to do writing, and then I went to school to become a programmer. I learned ASP first, followed by Actionscript and Visual Basic. I know, how boring. On the side, I began to learn PHP and doing more dynamic things with the visuals on websites. Once I left that school, I did an internship with Université Laval in Quebec City, where I learned how to work with Javascript. Then I went to work at Congebec, where I was the only person on staff to work on the websites (I had a very good coworker who enjoyed the challenges of helping me in the more complicated things though, so it was fun), that’s where I built a consolidation program entirely of ASP and SQL. After that I moved around a bit, trying to get my bearings, escaping life, and found myself in Montreal, where I used the things I’d learned along the way to even have the opportunity to work at the National Film Board of Canada. My bosses always pushed me and today I am a much better programmer because of it.

I’ll try to update this soon.