Hi,

My name is Joe Kamphaus,

I was born and raised in Mountain Home, Idaho and graduated from Boise State University in 1985 from the Vo-tech school for HVACR and have been working at that field now for over 20 years. My passion, however, lies with computer programming. I am at a place in my life where a change of careers seems possible. I seized upon an opportunity to go back to school and have now graduated the Computer Networking Program at ITT Tech. I am looking for an opportunity to change my passion and my hobby into a career. I believe I have much to contribute. I bring to the table a long history of problem solving and customer relations combined with excellent coding abilities as well as my passion for programming.

I am skilled in many programming languages: PHP, tcl, Perl, VB, .Net to mention a few. I am an active contributer of Perl modules to CPAN and have been using PHP MySql and Perl for web apps and Linux apps. I have been using .NET for Windows apps. I have written a PHP app to access a recipe database. I also wrote a PHP Photo Gallery to display photos making the thumbnails on the fly. Additionally I have written an on line calendar which saves events to a MySql database in PHP.

I have been using the Linux Operating System for about 10 years. I am skilled in using and administration of most distributions and have even made a Linux from scratch system. Lately I have been working on an open source eyes free interface to the Linux Operating System. I have several Blind friends and family and saw the need for an easy to use, easy to learn interface to do simple computing tasks. While emacspeak is a robust tool, it is difficult to learn and not worth the trouble for many individuals. I intend to make it easier for blind people to use Linux.

I first got interested in programming when I was home schooling my son and he wanted to learn to program. I had to learn it in order to teach it. I fell in love right away. He, however, found it too tedious. I have since been mostly a hobby programmer for 11 years. In that time I developed many games and applications for myself, friends, and family. In the last 2 years I have developed several applications for local businesses using VB with the ADODB library.

Other things I enjoy are fishing and gardening.