Stephan Beal's Online Home

Contact Info

Email: stephan@wanderinghorse.net, sgbeal@googlemail.com, and that other one which, if you need, you already have.

(My mailbox goes through very unforgiving spam filters, so please try to make your mails not look like spam or they will almost certainly get lost on their way to me.)

Social media (roughly in order of frequency): BoardGameGeek, @mewe, @twitter (rarely used), G+ is dead! Long live G+!
In March 2019 i deleted my (long-unused) Facebook account because of numerous gross security/privacy transgressions on their part. (FB was too loud for me, anyway.)

About me in a nutshell

Born in 1972 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Spent my growing-up years in Houston, Texas. The now-defunct Compaq relocated me to Munich, Germany in 1997 and i've spent the majority of the time since then living in or near Munich (with stints in/around Berlin in 2006/2007 and 2023-present). i've worked professionally with computers since 1994 and hobby-wise since Christmas Day of 1983.

Until severe chronic RSI, caused by programming night and day for two decades, effectively knocked me out of the software development world in 2014, programming was my life. Nowadays, though, my computing time is extremely limited :(. i still occasionally work on a couple small-scale personal projects, but no longer contribute significantly to 3rd-party Open Source projects except for the Fossil SCM and its sibling projects in unpredictable spurts as my hands allow. Instead, i tend to tinker with tabletop games, with a strong preference for cooperative games.

My favourite programming language is... it's a tie between C and C++, and i'm quite proficient with both of them, if i may say so. i have also been known to use Java, ECMAScript, Perl (which i dislike), PHP (which i dislike even more), s2 (which i wrote!), TCL (a deceptively elegant language), plus a number of quasi-languages like the bash shell, SQL, XML/XSLT and "make" (truth be told, i've written some epic Makefile code in my time, and hacking on build processes is its own meta-hobby). i am proficient in a wide array of computer-related skills and am a fairly prolific technical writer when the mood strikes, but i can do basically nothing else of any practical use. (i played guitar for about 25 years, but had to give it up due to RSI.)

Linux has been my operating sytem of choice since last millennium, but any Unix-like OS will do in a pinch. i find Microsoft Windows physically, philosophically, and psychologically painful to use and have boycotted A&&le since the mid-1990s because of their customer-unfriendly, monopolistic, lock-in business practices (which have only worsened since then).

So... that's about it, really.