If you heard of me on the Internet, you probably know me from either CircleMUD, Final Fantasy Tactics project, Scouter for Madden NFL, or Project Gameforms.

Otherwise, perhaps it was from public school in the Northwest Local School District around Colerain Township of Hamilton County in southwestern Ohio, USA. I attended Taylor Elementary (Fall 1983 - Spring 1989), Pleasant Run Middle School (Fall 1989 - Spring 1992), and Northwest High School (Fall 1992 - Spring 1996).

I later attended Miami University (Fall 1996 - Winter 2001) in Hamilton, Middletown, and Oxford, Ohio where I majored in Systems Analysis originally but graduated with a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science.

Best picture I have available is actually my 1999 driver's license photo (no, really!). Everything else is either really old or one I'd rather forget about.

For other information, I did an interview for MudWorld in April 2002. It has some other background information which goes more in-depth than I pretend other people care about on personal history. Although if someone has a burning need to find out what I ate for breakfast that morning you're welcome to ask. If you do, just promise not to come with 50 feet of me.

CircleMUD

I was at one point the head developer of the program I used to learn how to program in C. An interesting story even though I'm still sometimes mystified.

Final Fantasy Tactics

What happens when a company releases a very good, very rare Playstation game? I decide to take it apart and see how it works, of course. I blame Square for having a deceptively simple filesystem layout. On the bright side, it's a neat foray with puzzle-solving and theoretical skills. "Now, if I was a programmer on a tiny-memory machine, what would I do?" It also gives me an excuse to write more C programs to decypher the game's files.

Project Gameforms

I nagged The GIA enough about their technical problems during their run that I was asked by some of the departing staffers to help write a scripting system for their new endeavour, Project Gameforms. I wrote all the PHP scripts on the Gameforms site except for the news and letters sections, though I have since redid letters.

Scouter for Madden NFL

The draft system for Madden NFL 2003 drove me crazy in its utter tedium. What would logically be an excellent use of its spreadsheet-like data system was inexplicable reduced to individual screen displays with no sorting or comparison. So I took it upon myself to reverse-engineer the Madden database saved-game format and write a roster exporter. I know it's some ODBC-compliant database but a simple C program was easier than figuring out what obscure access method the game used. The result was a 36,864 byte binary program to read the database save file and output a CSV draft roster. The C source code is available as well, under a public domain with no warranty license. It's not particularly pretty code but it does the job.

Jobs and Retail Life

I have a résumé online because HTML is a handy format for it. I'm a computer programmer by love, education, and trade. I also do network and system administration because I find it frequently necessary in the pursuit of programming. (Oddly enough, Lynx doesn't mind é in a URL, but Internet Explorer and Mozilla both get HTTP 404 errors with it.)

Retail store work in an electronics section wasn't so bad since at least I could explain the computers but being punched in the parking lot by a disgruntled employee wasn't so great. I'm not sure how he thought I was stealing hours from him since I worked in a completely different department and I never asked for more. I was never really fond of selling computers to people anyway since the store only cared about the sale (it was the major money-mover for the store) but I had a moral objection to convincing people to buy computers (or add-on insurance) they didn't need nor could ever find use of.

For the record, asking a saleperson to lower the price in an office supply store is really annoying. Firstly, there's nothing I could personally change about the price (I didn't even get commission), and secondly, all it made me do was call over the manager so they too could tell you we don't change the prices. Why do you think they have a price there in the first place? Letting a salesperson change prices would only result in a "friend's discount" anyway. At least I can say that during all my time working in a retail store, I was never punched for refusing to lower the prices: a story learned from another ex-retail customer.

Contact Information

George Greer
2924 Bentbrook Dr.
Cincinnati, OH 45251-1120

Interestingly, the township registered itself with the postal service since it has a post office that can handle the volume. That address would be:

George Greer
2924 Bentbrook Dr.
Colerain Township, OH 45251-1120

I generally write Cincinnati because it is shorter. I lived at 9641 Manhattan Dr., a mile south of the Bentbrook address, until middle school. It was a much better area for youthful exploration with a nearby creek.

Phone numbers!

Home: (513) 851-0813
Cell: (513) 478-5149

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Last change: August 24, 2006