About Me

Welcome to the Road Goes On.  My name is Daniel Bingham.  Since you’re here you must want to know a little more about me.  Or else you missed — the URL bar’s a little higher up on the page.  No, higher.  There you go.

Anyway, I was born in 1986 in Hartford, CT to a young lawyer and a graduate student in Psychology.  When I was three years old my dad finished his Ph.D and decided it was time to go looking for a professorship somewhere.  Around the same time my mom got fed up with the high stress, no family time lifestyle that came with being a lawyer for a big law firm. Not to mention the gender discrimination that came with being one of the first generation of professional women.   We up and moved to Bloomington, IN where my dad became a professor of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington.  My mom eventually became a professor of Public Affairs at SPEA.  Being raised by a pair of former hippie academics definitely had an effect on me, and I’ve always been a huge geek.

When I was in fifth grade I decided I wanted to learn how to program.  I’d been inspired by Alex Seropian — creator of Bungie Gaming –  when he said, in the Marathon Scrapbook:

“It is better to be the man,” Alex realized, “Than to work for the Man.”

Alex dropped his cereal bowl in the sink, jogged down to the campus bookstore and skulked up to the register with a copy of Think C. He returned home to his Macintosh, determined to do whatever was necessary to become a one-man wrecking crew in the software industry.

Those two paragraphs lead me to try to follow in his footsteps.  At age 12 I was determined to become the youngest video game creator of all time.  Needless to say it took me a little while to get a handle on that whole programming thing.  During the summer following 7th grade, having spent two years playing video games and failing to teach myself how to write them, I attended a summer camp designed to teach kids my age to program.  It was called Camp CAEN.  It’s, uh, changed a little since the days I attended.  When I went there the main leisure activity was Counter Strike played over UMich’s massive LAN.  Also Starcraft.  Anyway, it was there I got my first real taste of C++.  After that I started writing small text based games, and struggled to continue learning the language beyond the tiny taste I’d received at camp.  I would go back to camp in the summer after my freshman year of high school in order to learn Java (and play more Counter Strike).

During my Freshman year of high school I discovered Multi-User Dungeons.  Specifically, I discovered Multi-Users in Middle Earth.  I’d always been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy.  I loved escaping to fictional worlds of noble (and sometimes, not so noble but golden-hearted) heroes and great dangers.  Now there were games.  That were all text, like reading a book.  That many people played at once.  That were basically virtual versions of those worlds I could play in.

I was hooked.  But as with almost everything I encounter in life, I thought: “I can do better.”  Of course, I had no idea how to go about writing a telnet server.  So I went out and found myself a code base, CircleMUD 3.1, and got to work.  Thus, Middle Earth Mud was born.

Middle Earth Mud sustained me and was my creative outlet all through High School.  At its peak there were around 30 builders working on zones and a handful of players.

After graduating High School in 2005 I attended Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.  I’d decided when I was very young that I wanted to one day head NASA.  Being a huge fan of science fiction I wanted to see humanity spread to the stars.  As usual, I was convinced NASA was barking up the wrong tree and I could do better.  But first, I determined I would have to become an Aerospace engineer so that I knew what I was talking about.  To that end I attempted a double major in Physics and Computer Science.  The Physics so I could go to an engineering graduate school, the Computer Science just because I loved it.

That should have been the first hint I was headed in the wrong direction.  Doing a double major so I could do what I thought I wanted to do and what I actually loved to do at the same time.  I should have simply majored in Computer Science and focused on it.  But I didn’t realize that until the end of my junior year.  After struggling with Physics and the work load that came with double majoring in two very difficult subjects for three years.  At that point, I decided I may as well finish it out as best I could.  I graduated with that double major, but my transcript isn’t terribly pretty.

The struggle made me realize that I’m not actually an engineer at heart.  It was always my little brother playing with the Legos and working with his hands.  Mean while I was always curled up in a corner with a book or planted in front of the computer screen.  I’ve always been better with language than math.  I got a 770 on the language portion of the SAT and just a 680 on the math (back when it was just language and math).

Since I graduated college I’ve been reconsidering where I want to take my life.  I still love computer programming, but don’t know if I want to make a career of it.  I loved what tastes I got of teaching from Camp CAEN and tutoring.  Having grown up with teachers for parents I feel completely at home in an academic or classroom environment.  However, my mom has also told me since I was little that I was born to be a lawyer.  I do greatly enjoy a good debate.  I still think I could do better than many of our leaders in government and could imagine myself very happily pursuing a career in politics as a legislator.

These and many other options lie open before me.  I have no idea which I’d like to pursue in the end.  For now I’m just sort of testing the waters of each.  I spent the last year working as a programmer.  I hope to spend the next year or two working as a teacher.

My projects suffered greatly while I was in college.  I had no free time for them.  Now that my weekends are my own again, I have am once more working on them.   Michelle is currently working as a chef and I have been spending a good deal of time learning how to cook as well. As a result, the project that has most of my attention is Fridge to Food.  However, I have not forgotten about the others and will return to them eventually.

That’s about all there is to tell, probably more than you wanted to know.  Welcome to the Road.  It goes on, you know.  Follow it if you can.