About Me

Greetings. Mike "manchicken" Stemle here. I'm a 25-year-old fella from the midwestern USA. I've been programming off and on since I was around 7, and I've found a lot of things I like to do. I started off on a Commodore64 when I was quite young, then moved to GeOS, and eventually DOS on the good old 386 with an orange monochrome monitor. With the help of my father who's been programming roughly since 1967, I've learned quite a bit about software development and best practices. My first compiler was Borland Turbo C++ 3. At 15 I started getting involved with Free Software and I started to fall in love with what you can do with freedom in software. At 16 I created a cluster of 486 GNU machines running slackware with coaxial networking, and fried several pieces of hardware before discovering that hacking hardware simply is not for me.

Now a-days I'm a professional software engineer in downtown Chicago writing Perl backend code for online ad networks. In my non-professional life, I spend time with my beautiful wife my church, and my friends. I participate in the Chicago GNU/Linux Users' Group, and am increasingly trying to participate in the Chicago Ubuntu loco. I've been doing some hacking for Kubuntu and have been having a blast doing so.

I'm currently running a 17" widescreen laptop running Kubuntu Edgy x86-64.