Me
<< that's me, Emanuel Rabina - professional software engineer and web developer, hobbyist digital/traditional artist and writer, currently based in the tiny little country of New Zealand.
I'm a computer programmer by trade, with the Java programming language as my main weapon of choice. Coupled with my years of university, work experience, and an unbounded curiousity, my arsenal has expanded to include a whole host of software tools and technologies; effectively quadrupling my vocabulary of acronyms.
But it's not all geek-thinking in this confused-looking soul. I've delved into several more creative subjects over the years, and the 2 things which have stuck are my writing and drawing, both of which feature prominently on this site.
I currently have an ongoing programming project: Red Horizon - an attempt to recreate the older C&C games with more flexibility for modern systems.
The Site
Ultraq is an alias I use on the Internet, and Final MooCow is an online portfolio for all my digital endeavours, and a good reason for me to keep my web development skills up-to-date.
Named after a text file that I used to keep tabs of all of my stuff, the site was first put up on the Internet in late 2000 (version 4). Utilizing the now-much-hated HTML frames, and littered with irrelevant images and semi-relevant quotes, the Final MooCow website was born. And like any humble beginning, my first hosting plan was one of those free ones that liked to violate the upper section of your pages by inserting an epilepsy-inducing advertisement. We all had to start somewhere right?
The shameful thing is that it stayed that way for several years. It followed me through high school and university, and was not my favourite bullet point in my CV. In my last year of university, I finally decided to do something about it - what self-respecting job hunter would want to be caught with such a website? Mid-2005 saw a new look (version 5), a paid-for hosting service, and the purchase of my own domain name: ultraq.net.nz
The job I managed to land later that year gave me all the answers I needed to solve my last issue: the burgeoning amount of stuff on my site. Servlets and JSPs saved me from static content hell, and my spare time was spent performing static-page genocide as I transitioned to dynamic-content heaven. Then a workmate introduced me to the CSS Zen Garden, which in turn put me on to XHTML and better CSS, which did wonders for the presentation of this site. Couple that with my changing tastes in design, aesthetics, and my improvements in photoshopping, and the site gets another major version number boost.
Each minor version of version 6 has just been me messing around with the design/layout. Versions 6.0 through 6.4 maintained this look. 6.5+ is what you see now.
So it looks like there's always something new to learn, something new to do, something that I can add/take-away from this site to make it better. And from that, the 'work-in-progress' moniker - at the bottom of every page - is created.
The Final MooCow is currently hosted by interAdvantage.
