My name is James MacAulay and I live in Ottawa. I am studying Cognitive Science at Carleton University, focusing on the computer stuff. After high school I spent a few years learning how to draw and animate, but then I realized that doing it for 8-12 hours a day was not my cup of tea.
Thankfully, unlike my response to learning the craft of animation, the more I delve into computer programming the more thoroughly I enjoy it. Like a lot of people, I first started coding when I was about ten years old with BASIC (GW-BASIC, to be precise). I mostly just fooled around making mini text adventure games and so forth until my high school computer programming classes, which broadened my horizons considerably. I enjoyed programming, but didn’t really go out of my way to explore it in-depth until after ditching “the animation thing.”
Right now my language of choice is Ruby, and my favourite things to build and hack are Rails apps. The icing on the cake is that there’s a nifty user’s group in town which meets regularly so that like-minded Ruby enthusiasts can shoot the shit and drink beer together.
Besides coding and reading blogs, I like to do all the usual things: play video games, listen to music, watch movies, read good science fiction, take photos, and ride my bike.
