Name: Ben Stone
Age: 17
Occupation: Student, Local computer geek
Height: Not too short, but short enough to have others tower over me
Weight: Light

Interests: Computers, Music, Animation, Film-making
Likes: Programming, solving real-world problems using my geeky skills, setting up PCs and networks, playing music
Dislikes: When software breaks for no apparent reason, irrelevance, vendor-lockin, Digital Rights Management

Platform of choice: Intel x86 Platform / i686
Processor of choice: Intel Core 2 Duo
OS of choice [Client]: Windows XP Professional SP2
OS of choice [Server]: Both Windows Server 2003 and Linux are good
Web browser of choice: Mozilla Firefox 2.0
Handheld PC: Acer n50 Pocket PC
Game console of choice: Xbox, modified so it’s not as much of a game console as it is a media centre
Music Skills: 8 years of piano, 4 years of alto saxophone
Piano/Keyboard of choice: Roland KF-90 Digital Intelligent Piano
Saxophone of choice: Keilworth EX-90 Series III Alto Saxophone
Musical taste: Hmm … quite open, from music featuring classic-sounding eighties synthesisers to techno to classical to Herb Alpert.

Favourite famous quote: “640K ought to be enough for anybody” - Bill Gates, 1981.

Biggest acheivement so far: Winning the state-wide VITTA 2005 Programming Excellence Awards, which is sponsored by Microsoft which makes it even more special.

Ambition: To hopefully make it big as a software developer, either by making some tool which becomes insanely popular, or by working at Microsoft / Apple / IBM / Adobe / another big software company.