OK, I'll bite.
I have led what can only be described as an improbable life; at least it is improbable in the modern era. You could call me a bit of a Renaissance man, I suppose, or perhaps a polymath. Or, rather, you could have, while my brain was still functioning properly. At the moment (and very likely for all of my remaining moments) I am not doing anything for a living. I have little control over my body, the memory of the proverbial goldfish, and (though it's sometimes difficult to tell in the online world) I have a great deal of difficulty with understanding language or making myself understood. Technology hides a lot of that, but it can't hide my inability to synthesize new ideas (or, on the odd occasion when I can, to later comprehend those ideas). I have moments when I am very nearly as lucid as I once was (if you can ignore the chorea and the drooling, spitting, stammering and slurring), but they are few, unpredictable and short-lived. I get by on a small government allowance (and when I say small, I mean small -- my total income last year was less than two thousand dollars Canadian) plus the odd gift from friends (like the computer I am using at the moment).
That being said, I started as a mathematician and fine artist (painting in oils). In the rebelliousness of youth, I rejected mathematics (mostly due to the interest being shown in me by the Society of Actuaries -- who actually wants to do statistics for a living?), threw away several large scholarships (that would have allowed me to pursue an education at a considerable profit) and went on to do "honest work". Two years as a general labourer, digging ditches and so forth, convinced me that I might not be quite as "honest" as I imagined myself to be.
I became an electronics engineering technologist in the military, and eventually took that into the civilian world working as a college instructor in electrical engineering and mathematics while pursuing research. (I was first introduced to SGML, and later HTML, during this period -- long before there was a publicly accessible Worldwide Web.) I sort of lost interest, though, as VLSI replaced discrete circuits and digital supplanted analog (it was a while ago, yes). Designing ASICs didn't hold quite the magic for me that wielding a soldering iron did, and while dedicated digital circuitry has its advantages, I found software for general-purpose computers much more fascinating.
My fine art and photography hobbies combined with my computing addiction to make me a very early entrant into the digital design arena. It was difficult to get clients, and even more difficult to make a living, when you consider that the machine you bought today would be little more than a doorstop tomorrow and very few people outside of the industry understood what computers could do. I remember paying something in excess of $40K for a proofing printer that wouldn't begin to measure up to somethng you could buy at Wall*Mart for $40 today and having to explain to clients that their ad would actually look better in the newspaper than it did in my proof -- and you know what newspaper pictures look like. That business eventually died in the recession of the early '90s.
I worked for a while again as a teacher, this time at the high school level, teaching English and Mathematics. The lack of enthusiasm from the majority of my students was disheartening, so I left that arena after a year. I spent the majority of the '90s working as a craftsman, first building fine furniture, then restoring and conserving antiques, specializing in leather goods. I couldn't help noticing, though, that I was doing a lot of unofficial (and unpayed) computer consulting on the side.
Greed got the better of me, so I went into the computer consulting field full-time. I made a pretty good name for myself (and am still world-famous, albeit in a relatively small niche world). About five or six years ago, though, I noticed I was becoming clumsier than my usual clumsy, and that I was making a lot of mistakes of the sort I simply never made before. (Interestingly, I was on my way to Cape Town to take up a consulting/teaching position with a local IBM affiliate when my first major dissociative episode occurred.) I initially suspected incipient burn-out, so I took a bit of time off to recharge my batteries. Turns out those batteries were NiCd, and would no longer take a charge.
So here I am, an oracle of ancient wisdom (I still have an encyclopaedic knowledge, I just can't use it for much except answering other people's questions). I still have good friends and memories -- nothing recent, mind you, but memories nonetheless -- but apart from the occasional photograph (tethered cameras and tripod heads make up for a lot of physical problems) or the occasional bit of obscure technical knowledge, I have little new or useful to contribute to the wider world.
... and I also get to annoy Corey a lot...perks of the job.
