My name is Kevin Hjelden, and this is my site. I have graduated from California State University: Sacramento with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathmetics & Computer Sceince (double major). While at university, I took a lot of elective classes that I thought would be interesting, including number theory (I wanted to do cryptography), game programming, graphics programming, advanced algorithms, and robotics.
Online, I go by the name FryGuy, and in real life some people call me it too (although only by people who know me online as well). I’ve gotten a few inquiries as to why I chose this name, and I suppose I can explain it here. First of all, it is not because I am a fry cook, or because I eat fries all the time (although I do eat my share of them). Also it’s not because I do drugs and I’m always fried (I don’t know where that came from either). It started when I was in second grade when I had a yellow McDonald’s sweatshirt which had a couple McDonald’s characters on it, one of which was FryGuy. Anyways, I played tetherball one of the people I knew that was in third grade at the time and he called me FryGuy because of the shirt. Anyways, when I made it to Junior High, he saw me again and remembered the shirt and called me FryGuy while my friends were around. Then they poked fun at me about it and I was looking for an online name to use and decided to choose that one. And the rest is history.
I’ve created a few maps for the game Team Fortress Classic, which is a mod for Half-Life. I used to be heavily into clanning for that game, but have since stopped since I don’t really have much time lately. My first clan was the Armed and Insane Monkeys [AIM]. I was with that one for roughly 6 months from March 2001 to around August 2001. The clan was disbanded and I joined the Gods of War, and I stayed with them until around November 2002.
I also like to program in my spare time in c/c++. I enjoy writing short programs to solve puzzles and similar things. Also, I like writing games and modifying games to make them more enjoyable. I programmed for Sparky’s Utilities for Team Fortress Classic, and I was an active developer for the d2jsp Diablo 2 Java Script language.
In 2004, I started playing around with C#, and I bought a book about it. I started to write a program called Poker Saver to compete with Poker Tracker. I had been playing poker lately, which inspired me to write the program. I’d like to think I was successful at it, but I played on the free/low-limits with won free money so I can’t judge it. I did win $45 at Reno on a $2/$4 Kill table when I went on a trip though, so I can’t be too bad.
More recently, I’ve been doing a lot more programming in C#, including a writing a program for my friend that interfaced with a microcontroller that could read signals from a person’s eye in order to track its motion. I’ve also used it in a project for OSS (see below). I am also relatively proficient in java, given that I have taken a few courses at university that required me to use it. Between the two languages, I like C# much better because of a few reasons. One of which is the GUI builder is significantly better and more responsive, and the second is a few language constraints (get/set syntactic sugar, to avoid the unnatural “getX()” “setX()” methods.
I am also pretty confident with microcontroller programming, specifically on the Atmel line of microcontrollers (atmega8/16/32/etc). I’ve done a lot of small projects with them, including reading sensors and driving motors and servos with them. Working with such simple microcontrollers has given me a big appreciation for how complicated computers really are. Doing things like dealing with interrupts manually on the microcontroller lets me use some of the knowledge I gained in college about computer architecture and explains how to better optimise certain code because I can see how it will be ran on the processor. This is one area I’d like to develop further and do more things with.
I have worked for CWNet, which is an Internet Service Provider based in Sacramento, California. I was a Web Application Developer and develop applications for the employees and management, and before that I worked on the back-end of a price search engine. The biggest application that I created and currently maintain at CWNet is a trouble ticketing system which is currently in use and has been in operation for over 5 years.