The website didn't tell me anything exciting on my arrival today, but I know it's my Monk Day because it's also my older step-son's birthday. :) Matt's now 35 (yikes).

My Dad, who was 90, died this Fall. He was a retired actuary, and loved Maths. His father was a higher-up at one of the insurance companies in London, so Dad kind of fell into that field, although I think his first love was trains and civil engineering. When I started to show an aptitude for math, he would gladly give me a problem (like calculating ten factorial) to go to sleep with. He worked on his insurance company's computer system, an IBM 360 package called A Life Insurance System (ALIS, an IBM product, obviously), written in COBOL. He also did some work in APL (another brilliantly name IBM package that stands for A Programming Language).

So, by the time my high school got time-sharing access to the school board's mainframe so we could learn BASIC, he was all keen to jump in and try it out (Fall of '73), by writing a program that calculated the probabilities of the various blood types in a population. I became one of the nerds who would hang out in the computer room, trying out code and watching fellow nerds do cool stuff on the teletype. Sometimes, we'd download our programs to yellow paper tape.

University work terms led to me learning assembler, and then C. Full time work led to Pascal, then awk and Perl. SQL crept in pretty soon after that. Once outside the safe walls of university, I had to figure out my own continuing education, which is where the Perl community came in. I started with the local Perlmongers, and continued with this community. It's a cool place to ask questions, read other folks' answers, and maybe provide some answers of your own.

My education continues to this day. And I thank you all. :)