Hi, my name is Ben Walton, and I'm the owner/operator of this site, and this server. I'm a 25-year-old Computer Scientist currently employed at the Georgian College Residence.

I'm a Linux enthusiast and spend a lot of my time fiddling with computers running this wonderful Operating System. I have a small home network of three machines that all (currently) run various versions of Debian GNU/Linux. In the past, I've run RedHat Linux and Suse Linux.

I've enjoyed programming almost since the day I first sat in front of a computer. My parents bought our first computer in 1991 (386 SX-16 w/1MB RAM and a 40MB hard drive) and I haven't looked back! An older friend of mine showed me some BASIC (our machine came with MS-DOS 4 which included GW-BASIC) and I've been hooked since then.

In highschool, I took the first programming course that I could which was given on Commodore 64's at the time. The neatest thing we did there was write small programs in a language called HYPO. HYPO was basically a machine level programming environment.

After that intro course, I took all of the Computer Science classes available until I finished the OAC course in grade 12. During this time, I programmed in Turing, a real hack of an interface driven language called Authority and Borland Turbo C (++) for Windows 3.1. Of these, I learned the most about programming from Turing. It let you focus on the algorithms and technical details by keeping it's syntax simple and providing some nice IDE tools (auto-indent, anyone?).

After highschool, I enrolled at Lakehead University in the Honours Computer Science program. In 2002, I graduated with and HBSc Computer Science (Co-op) First Class Standing degree.

At Lakehead, I was exposed to many different aspects of computing. Among the languages that I picked up are: Pascal, C, FORTRAN and Java to name a few. I also developed a fondness for the UNIX operating system. This led me to Linux which I believe to be a very worthwhile hobbyist project. I currently support the principles of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU's Not Unix project. I think that software should be free (as in speech, but free beer is nice too) and as such release all of my projects under the GNU General Public License which I think encourages other developers to build upon the foundations of those who went before.

And now for the more important stuff! I'm currently engaged to be married to Wendy Richard. I met Wen at Lakehead...she lived next door to me in residence during first year. We've been dating since January 6, 1998. We moved in together after our second year at Lakehead and have been living together ever since.

This past January, I proposed to her and she said yes (naturally <grin>). We're going to be married on June 5, 2004. You can read all about our wedding at Our Wedding Page.

If you want to write me, check out my contact page. I always welcome email! Thanks for stopping by...