Well, I guess it's my turn to introduce myself now.
My name is Olle Johansson and I live in Sweden, the somewhat cold country in the north of Europe. I grew up in a small town (about 50000 people in all) called Östersund in what is called the northern part of Sweden. Geographically it's smack in the middle though. It's the town that's been trying to get the winter olympics for quite a number of times but never succeeded.
I moved around quite a bit in Sweden, I was born in Uppsala, which has the oldest University of the Northern Countries (founded in 1477). Quite soon my parents moved further north, to a place called Sollefteå, and a few years later they settled down in Östersund where they still live.
In the years 1990 and 1991 my family moved to Tanzania, in East Africa, to do volunteer work so I studied at an english speaking school together with people from all over the world. We also got to go on a lot of Safaris and other kinds of trips, and I've seen more wildebeests than anyone should have to in a lifetime. They're really ugly. =]
When I finished High School I moved to a town called Linköping, which is the fifth largest town in Sweden with a population of 130000 or something. There I lived for about two years trying to study Computer Science at college, which didn't go too well since there was so much other fun things to do. =]
In Sweden there is a government funded college loan organization from where you get money to study, but only if you finish enough courses. Since they didn't want to loan me any more money I got a job as a Web Programmer at a small internet company in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. I stayed there for about two years until I got fed up with the managment and switched to another, more technically oriented company. Unfortunately, they didn't get the funding they'd been promised so they had to let me go after 6 months. A bit sad, since I got quite good pay, but there wasn't much I could do. After that I was unemployed for about a year since no-one in the computer industry employs anyone, at least not here in Sweden. This fall I moved back to Uppsala, where I was born, to study again, also Computer Sciences but a bit more practically oriented than the last time.
I've been interested in computers since my big brother bought a ZX Spectrum some time in the early eighties. Later on, my other older brother and I saved up enough money to buy our own computer, a Commodore 128D. A couple of years later we sold it to buy an Amiga 500 and since then I've owned an Amiga 600, Amiga 1200, Amiga CD32 and an Amiga 4000. Nowadays I use an Intel based computer with Linux, which has been my main choice since 1997 (when I first went to college).
I ran a BBS on my Amiga sometime in the years 1994-1996 but had to take it down when I hade hardware problems at the same time as I was called in to serve my country. I was supposed to be a Cryptographer since I scored top points on the IQ test and for some strange reason managed to pass a morse signal test. For reasons I won't bore you with I didn't complete this though.
The website I'm using threads for is
www.rollspel.nu which is the largest site in Sweden for pen-and-paper roleplaying, like Dungeons & Dragons. This has been a hobby of mine since something like 15 years back and I've even been on the board of an organization called Sverok, (the Swedish Role Playing and Conflict Gaming Federation,) which is a nationwide, governmentally funded, organization for gamers in Sweden. It has about 25000 members and a yearly budget of about 550 000 US$.
I enjoy writing short stories, and adventures for RPG:s, but don't get enough time to do it nowadays. I have a lot of ideas though and I'd like to finish some of them some day. It would also be nice to write my own RPG, but it is quite a lot of work and will probably never happen. I have however written my own board game, called Ultra Ducks, where you play ducks who can get all kinds of weapons and strange mutations. It's quite hilarious if I may say so myself. It had a print-run of 1000 and it's sold out now, which I'm quite proud of. It was actually possible to buy the game in stores all over Scandinavia.
