About

About TheSpinningDonut.com

Welcome to the TheSpinningDonut.com!! My name is Bill Stevens and apparently I have no face - or head for that matter. :)

What is TheSpinningDonut.com?

This blog will help you with various aspects of information technologies such as using your computer, blogging, software development, online media, internet marketing, and making money online.

Given the name of the site I hope it makes you chuckle. I named it after the spinning blue “wait” icon we Microsoft users see everyday in Vista. But, every operating has its own spinning donut. Play Video.



Who is Bill Stevens?

I’m almost 50 years-old!! DANG!! A married male with two daughters in their twenties and I’ve been in the Information Technology field for a bit over 20 years.

I started with IBM Mainframe computers and moved through file servers to today’s rack-based servers, blade servers, SAN-based systems.

IBM 4341 Mainframe

I was a tape librarian in the mainframe world moving on to Cobol programming, Mainframe Assembler and various other programming languages used to produce reports out of the mainframe.

I Love Programming!!

When DOS showed up I dug into it hot and heavy. Using one of the first IBM PCs with a 10MB hard drive I managed to squeeze IBM’s C compiler onto the hard drive so I could write some PC programs.

As PCs progressed rapidly in capabilities I ate up and dug into all kinds of programming languages. Assembler for the PC, Modula-2, C/C++, Pascal, Clarion, Delphi, dBase III/IV, on and on.

I remember spending significant time with vector graphics programming. There was a standard book that seemed about 1,000 pages that contained tons of code examples on writing games for the PC and manipulating the graphics card at a low-level, assembler. I loved this type of programming for at least two years.

I had a facination with getting as close to the processor board as possible from a programming point of view. I wanted to know what made each level of code work.

I remember tweaking higher-level loops by disassembling the loop structure in assembler to see how much work the registries where doing moving data in and out during the loop cycle. By coding the loop cycles so the registries did the most efficient amount of work we felt we had coded the best and fastest loops we could in the higher-level languages.

Claim to Programming Fame (in my mind anyway)

My first big programming “win” was taking an ailing project that was going on two years of programming and finishing it in 3 months. At the time, there were a lot of third-party tools to help make the DOS programs we created look professional and do a lot of nice graphics - for DOS anyway.

All the late night programming sessions where I deprived myself of very little sleep paid off because some of my work at this time awarded me various promotions that gave me the confidence to move on to bigger, more better (advanced english) and newer stuff.

Full Time Musician

For 12 years I was a full-time musician in quite a few different genres, although Jazz was my favorite I did a lot of show drumming and jingles for radio and TV. Here are some of the folks I performed with: