It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighbouring stars, and, shortly afterwards, by the issuing of over six and three quarter million writs for damages from all of the major landowners in his Galactic sector. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself, and there are several possible theories to explain this. — Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fit The Ninth.
Everything else is autobiography, and by its nature self-professed. People know me out in the Big Wide World through my published works and what I do, not through what I merely tell them about myself. — Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
I am a computer programmer. I do it for a living. I'm not going to bore you with my curriculum vitae. Suffice it to say that I
What will probably interest you more is what I do outside of work, which is (amongst other things) the writing of softwares, reviews, and answers.
I have written a large number of informative articles, several of which have become immensely popular. By no means the first, but one of the earliest, such informative article was the Highly Unofficial Fidonet OS2PROG C++ Compiler Pros and Cons List, a list of C++ compilers that were available for OS/2, which I maintained and published regularly on Fidonet for several years.
I've been writing and freely giving away softwares for almost as long. One of my first projects for OS/2 was a complete replacement for the runtime library for Borland C++ 3.1, allowing it to be used to develop 16-bit OS/2 programs. From that grew the OS/2 Command Line Utilities and various other programs, including a set of Internet Utilities for OS/2. For two decades the Internet Utilities for OS/2 served one of the mirrors of this very WWW site to the world.
I was the moderator of the international OS2DOS Fidonet echo some years ago, and have been a long-time Fidonet contributor. I've been a long-time contributor to various Usenet newsgroups, and an occasional contributor to the RISKS Digest.
To my great surprise, Microsoft awarded me a Most Valuable Professional award in the area of directory services in 2003 and then again in 2004.
Out of my contributions on Fidonet and on Usenet grew the Frequently Given Answers, a set of answers that … well … I frequently give. Interestingly, it was the peculiar way that Google Web indexed my Frequently Given Answers that then led me to Wikipedia (Several of my frequently given answers had been cited as references in Wikipedia articles. At least one was one of my lesser-known ones, which Google Web was listing at the top of the list.) and thence to Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikibooks, and even Wikitree.
I have been a contributor to those projects since 2004 — occasionally even under my own name. (-: Yes, I am related to Sam Pollard and to Ernest C. Pollard. You'll notice that I was scrupulous about using independent, non-autobiographical, publicly available, sources to create both articles. Every single sentence (that I added, at least) can be confirmed from what is given in the references.
It was working on Wikinews and Wikipedia, and the discipline of always having to consider one's sources, that one has to adhere to if one is to be a good journalist or a good encyclopaedist, that led me to revisit and rewrite this page in the first person, rather than the third person as it had been for many years, in order to make it clear that this is autobiography written by its subject.