About

So... who is this BoltBait guy, anyway?

My name is Dave. I was born in Sacramento, CA in the early 60’s. Growing up, I was smart, but a poor student (bored). I was hanging out with my uncle Bill one Summer day (probably 1980 or so) and he took me to the college where he worked. He sat me in front of a Commodore PET computer and handed me the manual. He thought I could figure it out while he got some work done. I typed in some BASIC programs from the manual and got them to work. It was fun. After a couple of hours, I was figuring out how to modify the programs to do what *I* wanted. At the beginning of the school year, I asked the high school math teacher to offer a programming course. I scored 100% in the course–never missed a point on homework or test. The following year, I was the teacher’s assistant in that course. After graduation, I got a job programming computers for the local power company and I’ve been programming ever since. I programmed for Intel for over 23 years until my job was outsourced to India... :(

Along the way, I got a BS in Computer Science and a MS in Database Administration. I got married and had 4 kids. I bought a house in the mountains (at 4,000 ft. elevation--snows a few times per year) and I have a Toyota Highlander hybrid SUV with over half a million miles on it.

Some of my interests include science fiction (books, tv shows, movies, etc.), programming (C#.NET, SQL, JavaScript, etc.), art (I’ve contributed to the free Windows paint program Paint.NET codebase), music (I love blues, rock, and funk), and the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering (which is where my online handle BoltBait comes from).

I also like to build things. My most recent was a digital pinball machine. You can see all the pictures of the build HERE and now that the pinball machine is done, I’m working on a video game machine to go with it.

Buy me a cup of coffee?