I am a complete hobbiest when it comes to programming. I am also not that advanced at all. I've dabbled in programming over the years, since I first learned Q-Basic in 4th grade. I would go to computer lab at lunch in school where a teacher was teaching us Q-Basic. In the years leading up to Junior High I dabbled here and there with Q-Basic, and teaching myself Visual Basic, pre .NET, durirng the early 90's. Starting in Junior High, '94 or '95, I had several years where I was more concerened with starting a band than screwin with my comp. Than I graduated from highschool and took a semester of comp science at the local jc. That is where I was introduced to C++ and made some programmer friends. Haveing Stopped attending classes after that semester to take more jobs as a freelance AV Tech, programming got put back on the back burner. Since than I've continued dabbaling here and there with C++, and taught myself a little python. I am now, for no other reason than I wanted to, well I also kinda like the C++ style formatting as opposed to the white space formating of python, I've started to teach myself perl, so here I am. I have no real use for programming, it has, for some reason, just always really interested me. Because of this my programs tend to be ultimatley pointless and more of an excerice in 'I wonder if I can write a program that does this... '. Also I don't have any real tasks to automate since all i really do on my computer is check e-mail and study random topics of interest on the net via resources such as wikipedia/wikiversity and PerlMonks. And i'm really bad about checking my e-mail.