Mirque is my alter-ego, an Everquest Dark Elf Enchanter, capable of holding multiple enemies in "suspended animation". He's been in retirement ever since early 2005, when I moved on from Everquest to World of Warcraft, but none the less, he's still one of my favorites. Although on his own he can do little serious damage to an enemy, in a team he was a powerful ally.
In real life (whatever that is) I'm an aging computer programmer and wanna-be athlete. I've run consistently for many years, including 2 complete marathons (PR 3:38) and many, many 10K's (PR 41:20). In recent years I've been slowing down but I still get in a few races, including the Leaf Peeper's Half Marathon in Waterbury, VT (a beautiful rolling dirt course most of the way) and running up Ascutney Mountain (as we like to say, there's only one hill... unfortunately it's 3.7 miles long).
For many years I did software development for Logic Associates. We made a management information system for printing companies that helped them estimates the cost of print jobs, track inventory, ship product, invoice, etc. It was a great environment to work in, and we produced a pretty powerful system that is in use by many companies world-wide.
The Logic product used a proprietary database, and my crowning achievement was building a SQL DBMS and an ODBC interface around our system. ODBC is an industry standard for connecting to databases. It allowed us to build systems using the latest software tools that smoothly connected into our core system. I can remember talking to one vendor who wanted to sell us consulting time to build an ODBC interface. His shocked silence when I said that I had done it on my own was a nice ego boost.
Unfortunately in 2000 Logic was bought out by Printcafe, a new conglomerate of printing companies, The result can be judged by the fact that by 2002 the total value of Printcafe, including the companies it had bought and a new software system that it had tried to develop, was worth less than Logic alone had been worth in 1999. In any event, after a few more years I decided I had had enough, and moved on.