server: Can I get your name for the order?

me: Eh . eh.. .. eh. ..... Eh.... .... Evan

server: Took you a minute there, did you forget your name?

me: *https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="đŸ€Ź" title="Face with symbols over mouth" aria-label="Emoji: Face with symbols over mouth"> on the inside, whilehttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😁" title="Grinning face with smiling eyes" aria-label="Emoji: Grinning face with smiling eyes"> on the outside* Nawh, I stutter - and my own name is one of the words I consistently trip up on.
Sometimes I& #39;ll respond: "It& #39;s Evan" instead of "Evan".

Blending the "s" sound into the starting sound of my name helps avoid getting stuck on the "Eh" sound in my nae.

This did lead to a period of time of people referring to me as "It& #39;s Evan" in high school.
I avoided watching The Kings Speech for a few years, when I did get around to watching it - I could feel the anxiety he was having so much.

Glad I watched it, and think they did a good job with it - but a few things was like ugh, I could feel the tesnion in my chest building.
I& #39;ve also had a few phone calls / video calls where people have asked

* "are you still there?"
* "I think the connection is bad"
* "you cut out there for a second"

.... and it& #39;s just me stuttering.
I& #39;ve also had people tell me that the slight pause I have before responding to things, have made me appear that I am being "wise and thoughtful"

.... but also, often me stuttering and getting stuck on a word. Sooo, yeah ;)
Thankfully I did have access to good speech therapy in school.

After I had a teacher try and put me into special ed because I couldn& #39;t read outloud, I could read - just not outloud.

Did quite a bit in grade school, and a little bit in high school.
One of the ways it& #39;s impacted me in a positive way i think - is when I discovered online communities like BBS& #39;s, news groups, forums, etc.

Being able to express myself by writing and not worry about getting teased over getting stuck on a word, or how I spoke.
I wasn& #39;t the awkward kid who could barely say his own name, I was some kid behind a h4ndl3 on a forum being helpful and chatty and a wealth of information.

Going online, it& #39;s like I turned into the more helpful, friendly version of myself that I wish I could be in person.
Getting involved with my local BBS scene when I was in grade school was like opening up a whole new world for me.

I eventually opened up my own BBS. The last version of it was called "ep0ch" - in the 705 area code, until I moved cities - then was in the 905 area code.
Initially - I had all of the common BBS games - L.O.R.D, Usurper, BBS Hacker, etc that almost every other BBS in the area had.

Eventually I decided I wanted to run a different kind of BBS than the others, and removed all of the game.
Shifted the focus to the forums, and the file area - but instead of being a & #39;warez board& #39; - I had just started to get access to the internet, and I& #39;d go through new groups, gopher, collect & #39;hacker zines& #39; like 2600, phreak, etc
Figured killing the games would reduce the number of people using my BBS - but I was ok with that, was wanting to build a different kind of community - and there were a dozen other BBSs& #39;s that people could log into and play games on.
I had then heard about FidoNet - and figured out how to set that up and get connected to that network - finding the "nodes" that were the furthest away from me, but still a local phone call so I could connect to them and exchange messages with the network.
for text files I hosted on my BBS - I& #39;d have a general rule of thumb of:

"I needed to read them first, and understand them well enough to write my own summary for them of what it was about"
I got tired of typing in the summary of all of these files when I uploaded them to my BBS (especially since I would tend to try out different software and reset somewhat often).
I knew that zip files had a file_id.diz in them - that could be used to extract the summary of what was in a zip file to auto-populate it in the forums.

I thought it was silly to zip up a text file to add file_id.diz though
I was learning how to program at the time, and thought:

What if I could put the summary in the text file, and just read it from that?

So I wrote a little program that would extract text between two strings at the top of a file

-file_id.diz-
summary
-file_id.diz-
pretty much an opening tag and closing tag, I was in like grade 7 or something at the time.

In retrospect - the program is super simple, but at the time - I didn& #39;t even know how to open a file to read the contents of it.
I just had some example source code, and some code/examples from the SWAG archive that I dug through to try and figure things out.

It ended up working, and doing the job I needed it to do
and that was the first "useful" program that I wrote - I had written stuff before that, but this was the first one that did something for me, to make my life easier - and I was damn proud of it.
so uhh, this thread took a turn of "how and why I got into tech/programming"
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