About… it’s such a broad statement… about me, about this blog, about life, the universe and everything…

Lets start with something simple… me

On-line, my nickname is AthenaOfDelphi. Off-line, I’m known as Christina Louise.

I was born in the last month of 1971 (save anyone’s embrassment asking a lady her age) in Leicester. I’m into all the good things in the world of PC’s… programming, gaming, programming, gaming… and consoles (more specifically the PS2 and PS3). I play a variety of games, but I prefer the likes of Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, LittleBigPlanet, Quake III, Tomb Raider, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, Spyro, Ultima Online… you get the picture, I’m sure. Like many things in my life, I love variety. Too much of the same and I get bored… very… quickly.

It may come as no surprise then that I’m a software engineer (with nearly 15 years professional experience… now I feel old), most of my skills are based around Delphi (Versions 1, 3, 5, 7, BDS 2006 and RAD Studio 2009), but I also dabble with web based stuff, most notably the browser based game a friend (Spirit) and I run called The Outer Reaches which runs on a software platform developed entirely with Delphi and Kylix.

From time to time, I post articles (so far, these have included the basics of optimisation and the basics of multi-threaded programming) on www.pascalgamedevelopment.com. I’ve also written the Pascal Game Development programming competition website at www.pgdannual.com and organised the PGD Annual 2009 game development competition.

In my spare time, I like to listen to (and attempt to write) music, mostly dancey trancey stuff, but I also throw in some more rocky indie stuff and a bit of classical for good measure. I like to walk, take photo’s (I own a Nikon D70… if only I could do it justice with my artistic side), mountain bike (not done nearly enough of that in a very long time) and dabble with digital electronics and PIC’s. When I’m at home, I like to cook (a little too much in my humble opinion *looks at waistline*) and watch good movies and videos. My favourites being Stargate, Star Trek Voyager, Firefly, Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Horrors, you can keep em! I also like many of the comic book movies and you can’t beat a good action adventure.

If you want to chat, I may be lurking on IRC on the Netgamers IRC Network in our game’s channel #outerreaches.

Now, about my blog…

It’s powered by WordPress and sports a theme based on a design called Simplicity by Lai Zit Seng (I downloaded it from the Zit’s site and tweaked it to fit). It serves as my vent… when I need to vent my spleen about something, it normally gets done here, but I do, from time to time post small reviews, social commentary and other such stuff that people may (if they are so inclined) find interesting.

The extended bits are as follows…

• Better Blogroll – Jon Dyer
• Advanced Custom Field Widget – Me based on Custom Field Widget – Scott Allan Wallick
• Event Calendar – Alex Tingle (Plus the widget, originally by Darrell Schulte)
• pageMash – Joel Starnes
• Ratings – Scott Heavner
• Snap Preview AnywhereTM Plugin – Ajay D’Souza
• WassUp – Michele Marcucci et al.
• StatPress Reloaded – Manuel Grabowski
• Widget Logic – Alan Trewartha
• WordPress Database Backup – Austin Matzko (originally by Scott Merrill)
• WP-reCAPTCHA – Jorge Peña
• WP-RecentComments – mg12

And I must say a big thank you to everyone on that list for producing these plugins.

Now, the complex stuff… life, the universe and everything… well, actually its easy. To quote Deep Thought… 42.