self.presentation()

Well, it seems that I am going to take this "blogging" thing seriously i better present myself.

You call me tch, if you like to... I have been around this IT-universe since 1996. When I was 12 years old I finally got that magic box called "Personal Computer". Those were not very popular at that time, at least not here in Paraguay... either was the Internet.

At the beginning I was not very excited about it, I was just using it for school homework. Later in the 1997 I started to discover the "facilities" that the Internet could provide, Web browsing, IRC chatting, etc.

Let's say that the biggest discover came in 1998, when I found out about a few magazines related to Computers and Games, It could be considered as a "mental revolution". I started to get more and more interested in the subject, breaking down my own PC like kids do with their toys.

After a year or so, i had built my own "clone" personal computer, and by that time I had lots of compact disk full of "demo-shareware" games, desktop applications and Operating Systems. At that moment I had met a lot of other people also interested in Computers in general and Games, people that I met over the Internet or even at school.

We started playing Quake, and other games on a very poor improvised local area networks, using "the printer cable", later evolving to Ethernet cards and basic Hubs.

So at this point I can say I was an average 15 years old geek, playing games, doing some academic programming tasks on Pascal and Visual Basic, and testing every Operating System I had the chance to get the installer.

The second biggest impact came at some point of 2001, when i bought a magazine about games, this magazine had an amazing article about how it could be possible to build games using Quake II, Half Life and Quake III engines.

I started right away, downloaded all the tools available (q3radiant, Hammer, q3map, etc). So I started making game levels for Quake 2. I remember myself being locked inside my room spending hours and hours trying different stuff and reading the few tutorial available at the time...

But the best started when I found an Online Forum about Game Mapping, Modeling, Programing etc, so I posted a few screen shots from my personal work. I could not explain how excited I was the day after when I found a few invitations to participate in different Quake III modification projects.

Because I was a huge Japanese animation fan (Today more than ever) I started working on a Quake III modification called "Saviour of strength", where I met another amazing and talented people in all areas of game development process.

Later I worked on other Modifications, like "Rurouni Kenshin Redemption" another Japanese animation based game. By that time I had formed an huge technical and artistic knowhow. Sadly most these projects never came to light, and I had to stop spending so much time on them.

In 2003 I went to the university, for an Engineer degree, those were 5 years of discover and culture-technical-academical grown. When i was not busy with studies and research i spent a lot of my time helping the first Paraguayan Gaming community "Juegos Online Paraguay" with servers administration and programming.

I also spent "to much" time, playing on line games, "mmorpgs" mostly, met real good friends and had a lot of fun, but i had to leave both activities because of time constraints related to the university.

In the last university years I spent my spare time on very different subjects from basic functional programming and Modern Artificial Intelligence to game engine programming.

Just one month after finishing the university i was called by some people related to One Laptop per Child project here in Paraguay, an NGO called "Paraguay Educa" hired me to work on programming tasks.

Initially I was supposed to work on a "Inventory" system for laptops, and then it turned to be into a Remote Network devices monitoring system and other stuff. The most interesting thing this NGO provided me was the opportunity to work on an open and free source project called "Sugar" for which I contributed a few lines (or maybe more than a few) on a 3G modems support feature.

So thats it... after all these years I still feel like a 12 years old kid, anxious for learning and challenging myself to see how far I can get and how much i can do.