We've got a Romanian here!

Greetings all!

My name is Flavius and I come from EU, Romania. Soon to be 43, a Systems Manager by trade (fancy term for the IT guy) and passionate about computers and coding since I was about 9 years old.

My parents bought a Z80 Sinclair Spectrum PC for me and it piqued my interest for coding. Started with a bazillion books and magazines (mostly from UK, few from Romania) and learnt to code in BASIC quite fast. Then I started to wonder why can't I have those fancy loading screens that the games from my tapes had? Bad news at the horizon... if you want a fancy loading screen, you my boy have to learn strange new words like and, or, xor, registers, accumulators, bits oh my gosh! At 10 years old I would have rather go outside and play with my friends than learning to code assembly for Z80. But luckily my parents were working in Telecom and the PBX had some Z80 CPUs (don't know what their use was) and they brought home few humongous books for exactly that: assembly for Zilog Z80. Had no idea what I was doing but i remember I made my PC beep via assembly and a Basic program and i was on the MOON with happiness. And yes, maybe a year later I got my fancy loading screen happening. 😍 

Fast forward to '95 (if I remember correctly) when my parents got me an Intel P5 Pentium 100 Mhz! 8MB of Ram with a Quantum Fireball 1GB HDD, a nice S3 Trio UV+ with 2MB of ram Video card, what an absolute beast it was! Later on I've got a 3Dfx Voodoo 1 card in it and a Sound Blaster too. I still have this PC and still works flawlessly.  Anyhow, once I've got this PC I started delving in Turbo Pascal. Huge difference from Basic. I could do color graphics, moving triangles and 3D shapes that would animate smoothly without lag and jitter. I was floored.

Then one of my friends gave me a book: Learn to code in C (in Romanian language). C? What's C? What an odd name for a language... I need to find out everything I can about C! And well, dabbled with C for a while. Amazing! Then I moved along to C++ as I heard is nicer and better. OOP! What in the name of Jesus is OOP? Classes? But I pushed through and mastered the fundamentals of C++ as well.

Alright, enough blabbering. I was just a child that enjoyed playing football (soccer for our US friends) and code on his Z80 and P100 😊 

Nowadays I don't do much coding but I fiddled around with Arduinos and Raspberry PIs, made a lot of projects with them, the latest being a wireless thermostat for my Central Heating Unit in my home. 

My presence on this here forum is simple: meetings tinkerers, answer questions (if I'm smart enough haha), ask questions and you know, forums stuff. 😀 

I will undertake 2 projects, one of them being to convert my 1998 Landrover Freelander 1 to be a true Enterprise of the streets ("Computer, turn on interior lights!" or "How much further is it to my house?" or "Computer, look ahead and add a gas stop for me to refill"). Want to add a 10" LCD Touch Screen with overall Car Status (coolant temps, true GPS speed, Revs, voice announcer to remind me to turn on the Low Beams in the evening (via light sensor + time form GPS), turn OFF High Beams if there's a vehicle approaching from the opposite direction and many many more things. Yes, a giant of an undertaking, I know. But absolutely doable. 😉 

A second project is to have my 2008 BMW F650GS motorcycle fitted a 7" LCD with mostly bike and engine status (via OBD). I'll probably start with this first though. The "Enterprise" is a tad overwhelming. 

Anyway, thank you Bill for accepting me on the forum and I'm looking forward to see you all around here!