Hi gang! I’m Ryboflavins or Rybo for short, and I am so happy you are here! In this little corner of the web, I explore my interests in the bits and bytes of computer programming, gaming, and technology. With that said, let’s take a trip down memory lane.
Picture it, a small boy in the early 90’s, finally getting a family PC. Now sure, it was for “school work”, but in reality it was just as much for games. The Tandy 1000 RL had joined the Nintendo Entertainment System in the annuls of Ryboflavins computing lore. Now I had more options than ever to play games (and do that school work, I suppose), and the joy and fun provided by those two platforms stuck with me through the years. I have at one time or another owned each Nintendo platform (save the Virtual Boy, gotta find one of those), and most Xboxes and Playstations along the way. But it wasn’t all games, back then I also learned to tinker with the PC. Today those skills pay dividends, as I have spent many years as a computer technician.
Why the title “Totally Non-sensical”? Well, I have made plenty of mistakes along the way, some that just do not make sense. So the title just fit for what we do around here. The true name is “Rybo’s Totally Non-sensical Blog About Things”, but that domain name is a bit long, as such “Totally Non-sensical” was born.
To share one of my most vivid examples of not making sense, I remember playing around with commands in DOS on my 486 pc (yup I’m that old!), and came to one named FORMAT. For reasons forever lost to time, I ignored the massive warning that comes with it, and hit Y. Presto! I had a clean hard drive and no operating system. Now I know you’re thinking that it makes no sense to do that, and you’d be right of course. I learned the hard way, not only how to install Windows again, but also that curiousity has consequences AND benefits. Thus my curiosity was piqued.
More recently, I took some time studying the computer in our heads by getting a degree in psychology, and now return to the computer on our desks by working towards a degree in computer science. Over all of this time, I have not lost the love for video games however, and currently count myself among the many multi-platform game fans. I firmly believe in a perhaps unattainable future where we do not have to consider if we own the right platform to play a game. Having said that, I still have a deep fondness for Nintendo. Nintendo is probably the reason that future is unlikely, but I dream nonetheless. If I have learned one thing with my interest in gaming, is that exclusive platforms lend to tribalism, and that is what I try my best to not get mixed up in.
My posts here about programming will immediately betray hobbyist roots. My projects tend to be limited to a small problem I would like to solve, and thus have tried to learn how. Having begun in BASIC and later moved to Visual Basic (most versions), and Python, I started simple. Today I mainly use Swift and JavaScript, with help from the sage minds at Stack Overflow. I have yet to release a program to the general public, but you never know, maybe I will dream something useful up one day.
That having been said, those programming posts, fittingly, won’t always make sense. I know they rarely do for me, but that’s all a part of the learning journey. My hope is that a code snippet, or news byte (there will be puns) posted here proves useful to you in some small way. In other words, the mission here is ironically to be the opposite of its title. I hope to share my love of nerdy things: Video game news and reviews, my programming attempts, and commentary on tech news.
So let’s have some fun and learn along the way!
- Rybo