User:Charm

This user is a native speaker of the English language.

Ĉi tiu uzanto povas komuniki per baza nivelo de Esperanto.

Birth, Residences, and Education

Last update: 04-03-2015

Hi! My name is Charlene, or Charm. I was born December 30, 1970 at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth in Portsmouth, Virginia. I lived in Fort Worth, Texas for about five years; then I grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas and graduated from Lakeside Senior High School in 1989. My favorite subjects were math (up to and including Calculus), computer programming, and accounting. I participated in GATE programs, received creativity awards in Olympics of the Mind competitions, and participated in the Future Business Leaders of America competitions in the accounting category, placing third nationwide. I also played valve trombone, 4-top-valve euphonium, marching euphonium, and baritone (plus, briefly, tuba) in band for 6 years. I received an Associate of Applied Science degree in Data Processing from Garland County Community College ("GCCC", now called National Park Community College ) in 1994 and moved to Tucson, Arizona the next year. The dean of the Data Processing department recognized my accomplishments with a first-ever (he had me print it) Certificate of Achievement in Information Technology.

Family

My father is a retired radiographer, recovering from alcoholism. His hobbies include bicycling. My mother is office manager of the family's accounting office; she also is an accomplished pianist and organist. I was raised in the Christian church by her and my step-dad, a retired drafter and truck driver whose hobbies include automotive mechanics and drag racing. I ("hers") have one step-sister ("his", a nurse) and one half-brother ("theirs").

My first marriage of about a year and a half in the mid 1990s ended in divorce after my wife committed adultery at least three times; she later died from accidental asphyxia. She had a daughter who was an infant when we married. My second marriage lasted 13 years, and ended when my spouse passed away from metastatic melanoma on March 17, 2010. She had a son who was in his late teens, and a daughter who was 9 when we married. I am engaged to marry again on May 16, 2015 to a retired behavioral health technician. She and I have no children, previous or otherwise; although we do have a Chihuahua and a Labrador Retriever/Border Collie mix.

Employment and Other Experience

When I was in 6th grade, I found an introductory book about computer programming on the bookshelf in our classroom. We did not have any computers in the school; and I didn't have one at home, either; but I studied that book until I essentially had it memorized, then talked my mom into buying me another one. Although it technically doesn't count as employment, while I was still in 6th grade, I interviewed my mom and uncle then wrote an amortization program in the BASIC computer programming language for the family accounting business' Tandy Model 12 computer (ever seen an 8 inch floppy disk?), which allowed them to stop using faxes to send loan details to, and receive amortization schedules from, a local bank on a regular basis. They also had some kind of programmable calculator; I think it was a Texas Instruments model, but I had limited time with it, so I don't remember for sure.

My family had an Atari 2600 game system, and I found out there was a BASIC Programming cartridge (with special keyboard controllers) available, and coerced my parents into getting it. Finally I had something I could program at home! The bad new is, it had 63 bytes of program storage space, no external storage, and very limited functionality in general, but at least it was something!

When I went to junior high school the next year, the school had one computer: a Commodore VIC-20. It was in a math classroom where I didn't have any classes that year, so I didn't get to do anything with it. I did receive a TI 99/4a for Christmas, along with the TI Extended BASIC cartridge and a tape deck, but missing the required cable to connect the tape deck (I did receive an original poem written by my maternal grandfather explaining the cable was on the way; it arrived a few weeks later). The movie WarGames came out in May 1983, and I begged for an acoustic coupler so I would be able to connect to Bulletin board systems; however, my parents refused, saying they were afraid I would get into trouble like the character David in the movie.

In fall of 1984, I was able to help set up the school's lab of brand-new Commodore 64s, and take a programming class. We had fun with software like Colossal Cave Adventure, Deadline, SAM, and ELIZA, to name a few. I learned more about programming in BASIC, and also gained knowledge and experience with hexadecimal, assembly language, and even a small amount of machine language programming (via Jim Butterfield's SuperMon64). That year for Christmas I received my very own Commodore 64, and subsequently sold the TI-99/4a to a classmate to raise the money for a Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive. After I moved out of my parents' home, my best friend sold me a 300 baud modem for the Commodore 64, and I was finally able to start learning about Prodigy, AOL, BBSs including RBBS-PC, Telix (including its SALT programming language), ZMODEM and its pred ecessors, and so on.

I used the Commodore 64 as my home computer until shortly before Christmas 1990, when I bought my first IBM PC-Compatible, a Packard Bell machine with 1 megabyte of RAM and a 40 megabyte hard drive! I was in heaven -- there was no way I could possibly ever run out with all that memory and storage space! It wasn't long before my best friend, who was taking a Computer Programming course at GCCC, brought me a copy of the Borland Turbo Pascal compiler and his textbook, asked for help passing the course, and I learned a wonderful, new (to me), object-oriented programming language!

After six days working for a photographer at an amusement park, my first jobs were in fast food, primarily at Wendy's; I worked there intermittently for about 8 years. My highest position was Chief Crew Trainer; I trained other trainers. I performed most of the duties of management at one time or another, most notably inventory management. I reprogrammed the company's registers at all 3 locations in Hot Springs for a major menu and pricing change. I also worked for Taco Bell; and Waffle House, where I reprogrammed the registers at both of Hot Springs' locations for a Daylight Saving Time change.

While attending college, I did data entry work for the family accounting firm. The office was using PC-compatibles by then. They didn't want to invest in a complete network, but were using an inefficient and unsafe Sneakernet system to share client data on floppy disks among 3 employees, so I convinced them to buy a primitive (pre-Ethernet) four-port printer sharing hub. It allowed sharing the office's laser printer and also came with software to manually transfer a file over the hub. I programmed a system that automated backups and file transfers while ensuring that only one user was accessing a particular client's data at a time. As far as I can remember, I developed this system with a combination of DOS batch files, QBASIC, and the software that came with the hub.

At GCCC, I took courses that included RPG, COBOL, QuickBASIC (just imagine, compiling a BASIC program!), assembly, C, and systems analysis; and repeating math courses up to and including Calculus, this time at the college level; frequently exceeding class requirements and assisting fellow students. In my data structures class, one day's lecture about binary trees encompassed garbage collection; the instructor, who had a Doctorate Degree in Computer Science and was the dean of the department, lamented that while garbage collection was time-consuming and inconvenient, it was also unavoidable. I had been reading ahead in our text book (Data Structure Techniques, ISBN 0201072564), and approached him after class about AVL trees, which greatly reduce the cost of garbage collection, and he had me teach the class about them the next day. I was invited to help configure the college's internet connection; however, at this time I didn't have the knowledge to do so.

After graduating from GCCC, I transferred to Henderson State University for one semester. The Computer Science department normally did not allow transfer credits for Data Structures from 2-year colleges, because they didn't believe the coverage was comprehensive enough; however, after interviewing me, they accepted the transfer in my case. While there, I wrote a program in Turbo Pascal for my statistics instructor to generate flexible lists of strings (like AAZ00a, AAZ00b, ... AAZ00z, ... AAZ99z, AAY00a, ...) given a pattern and desired number of iterations. I worked as an assistant in one of the computer labs; and discovered VMS, ISCABBS, Mosaic, Telnet, TinyFugue, Gopher, Lynx, Pine (email client), and the internet in general.

Part of those topics I learned about through an "Introduction to the Internet" course being held online at Diversity University MOO (DU). I immediately became very ingrained in DU's culture and mission, and quickly rose from "Visiting Student Player Object (VSPO)" to "Builder", "Programmer", "Manager", and finally to "MOO Wizard". When I was promoted to Wizard, DU's founder, Jeanne McWhorter, told me I was the only person who ever said at the beginning of their involvement with the MOO, that they would eventually be a Wizard, and accomplished the feat. My second spouse, Cindy J. Tallis ("CindyT"), taught many teachers and students the beginner basics of MOO usage over the years, and together we lead the introductory session at the 1997 DU MOO Conference held at Eastern Kentucky University as our honeymoon, and I held the Wizard position until DU's demise in 2006. My initial non-VSPO character name was MattWright, the name most other people familiar with DU would remember me by; I don't remember what it might have been as a VSPO, and after my legal name change it was, if I remember correctly, CharlieW or something similar. I created enhanced teaching tools such as the Generic Enhanced Lecture and did general troubleshooting and maintenance of the LambdaMOO and EduMOO core databases. I was recognized by other Wizards for my ability to maintain and debug code written by other users, known to be a particularly challenging task. My involvement with DU greatly strengthened my knowledge of object-oriented programming, systems administration and security, the internet and its myriad utilities and tools, and Unix/Linux.

As of April 3, 2015, I am updating this page, and, especially from here down, it is still somewhat incomplete and otherwise out of date. My intention is to finish after some errands; if you are reading this after April 10, 2015, please remind me to finish the update. Thanks!

After coming to Tucson, I worked briefly for Montgomery Ward, then spent several years in call center positions. I worked for Intuit supporting QuickBooks for about two and a half years, then I supported Windows 98/95 for a year and a half as an outsourcer (I prefer Linux, but it was income). I worked in data entry for about a year, and now I am a senior customer care representative for a major mobile phone company.

I have done some unpaid programming work for a distance-education organization called Diversity University. DU is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation whose primary service is an online MOO used by teachers to conduct classes online. My position at DU is that of a MOO Wizard, a programmer able to develop the restricted computer code used to run the system and administer security. Unfortunately, as colleges and universities have migrated to using multimedia websites for their online classes, the DU MOO's usage has fallen off. This is in spite of the fact that the MOO environment offers advantages of accessibility, interactivity, and collaboration that are not matched by webpages, email, and chat rooms.

Besides MOO language programming, my skills include C, Perl, HTML, and JavaScript, to name a few. I type 75-80 words per minute, and as you can probably tell, love to spend most of my time at the computer.

I have gonadotropic hypogonadism (most likely Kallmann syndrome, although this isn't officially diagnosed yet). I was raised as a boy; however, because my hormone levels are not normal for a male, my body and mind never fully masculinized, and I have always felt more like a female. For me, trying to be a man was a role that was very uncomfortable and unpractical, so I started living as a woman on April 27, 1999. I have had my name and gender legally changed, and am much more comfortable just being myself than trying to fit into other people's idea of who I should be and how I should act.