Can you tell us a bit of your personal life?
The most will know me by the nickname Patchou or as Patate Jaune. I currently live in Quebec, Canada. I’m a French guy who immigrated in this beautiful country after having found his girlfriend on an IRC channel.
I work daily in an office for a product called the U-Scan. Perhaps you already saw one of these in your local store. It’s a self-checkout computer that is meant to save you some time.
And for the rest, I really love manga (Japanese anime) and I’m also learning Japanese, Computer Technologies (Microsoft .NET, not Java in Linux), my girlfriend Veronique and of course, I’ve got a big TV with big speakers, which confirms that I’m a guy.
When did your passion for Computers/Programming start?
It started when I was 12 years old. That's 9 years ago. I wanted to get myself a NES (Nintendo) but my cousin suggested to my parents that an Amiga would be better. Now I really miss my Amiga 500+ and my Amiga 1200… well anyway, I started to learn how computers really worked with my Amiga. About 2 years later, a very good friend of mine (hello Corentin!) invited me to his home and showed me his 486 DX2 66Mhz. That seemed very complicated… but after some months, I decided that it was worth to buy one, as more games were PC only. (A big thanks to my parents who always believed in me).
So, to conclude this question… at the age of 15 I started to be interested in the C language, mainly because I read that games were developed using this language. I asked my father and he bought me a book and the Standard Edition of Visual C++ 4. I worked on this most of my time (which explains why I started to fail school in France 2 years after that) and I have to say that I am still addicted to programming
How much time do you spend behind your pc a week/day? And in your free time?
Pretty simple question… when I’m not at work, there is 95% of chance that I’m at home. When I’m at home, there is 80% chance that I’m in front of my computer. I’m sleeping about 6 hours a day (and I’m still searching for ways to sleep less but it’s starting to be difficult 
so a quick calculation would give 40 hours per week at home plus 40 hours per week at work. I know that some people will envy me for saying that but my girlfriend seems to be more than ok with my life style. She likes computers too (The Sims, of course…) and I think that I’m going to buy her an iPaq in the next weeks.
I don’t enjoy going out very much; I’m a pure 100% geek. In any case, I eat in front of my computer, I watch TV next to my computer while programming, and listen to music in front of my computer. I talk to my cat in front of my computer, I sing in front of my computer. If my girlfriend allowed me, I would probably put the fridge and the microwave next to my computer!
Who is your IT hero and what IT company do you respect the most?
It may surprise some of you but I really like Bill Gates and Microsoft. They are doing great things and I’m convinced that we would not use PCs today if DOS and Windows were not invented. Bill is a genius businessman and I’m sure that he’s a pretty good developer as well. That man, along with some others, made an empire on top of a computer that, in that time, was not suppose to be sold at more than 1,000 units a year.
Today, Microsoft provides us Windows XP and the .NET Framework which, for all of you that don’t know what I’m talking about, will probably splash Java on the walls in the very near future. This is a great technology and all of us will enjoy it in every upcoming software package. Remember those words!
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