Fotinakis.com:About

From Fotinakis.com

Huh? "Fotinakis"?

Fotinakis (Φωτεινάκης) is my family's full original Greek last name. It was changed to Fotes when they came to America, but I have always had a thought in the back of my mind that one day I would change my last name back to its original.

"Fotinakis" has also been my online alias for many years. After spending some time thinking about my previous aliases and how little they related to me, I wanted one that I could use with everything and that meant something to me. Because of this, Fotinakis was a natural choice. I eventually ended up registering this domain, and here we are! Read on for a bit of rambling about my life.

"Hello, my name is..."

Cutting to the chase—my name is Mike Fotes, a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and connoisseur of all things sweet and—OK, seriously—I'm a student, web developer, graphic artist, and singer. I'm currently majoring in computer science and minoring in music at Utah State University and working for USU's Programming and Design Team. I immensely enjoy singing, performing, playing the piano, and I have begun the lifelong journey of learning classical vocal technique. When not doing something in those areas, I also love medieval fencing and participating in SCA events, reading, and being with friends.

An Anecdote

I've been involved with computers for almost as long as I can remember. My first dive into the world of programming came when I was ten years old. My dad had finally given in and we had our first computer: a Windows 3.11, 16 MB RAM, 80 MB hard drive, powerhouse of a computer.

Like every child my thoughts were centered around entertainment and I could see the potential of this new machine in our house (after all, I had played games on my grandmother's IBM 8086, so you can imagine my thoughts when I saw that our new computer even had color and a mouse!). I kept bugging my dad to get a game for our computer. Finally he got fed up with me and said, "Look, if you want to play a game so bad, go make one!" And so...I did.

Enter: QBasic. My first endeavor at programming was to edit Nibbles (source here), the classic QBasic game (and now more well-known cell-phone equivalent) where you would direct a "snake" around the screen to pick up objects which would make the snake longer. I was always annoyed at this game because if you ran into yourself or any of the random walls placed on the board it was game over. Searching through the code, I found a simple line that said:

PointIsThere = TRUE

Not knowing any QBasic at the time, but using a ten-year-old's logic, I merely changed the "TRUE" to "FALSE" and started the program. Suddenly, I could run the snake right through itself and all of the walls without any "Game Over." That made me happy. And so, yes, my first attempt at programming was to cheat at Nibbles.

Graphic Design and Photography

My interest in Photoshop and digital graphics is linked with my interest in photography. My dad, an avid photographer all of his life, also initiated this hobby of mine after talking to teachers from schools around our area and learning that they really didn't teach anything in their photography classes except for how to set their new shiny digital camera on "Auto" and shoot a million pictures. So, one day he handed me a film SLR and said that he was going to teach me himself. Why a film camera? "You'll have to think about every shot. Every time you press the shutter, it is going to cost you money."

We skipped the basics and immediately dove into the complex stuff (complex, that is, for a complete beginner)—aperture settings and f-stops, exposure, zone systems, shutter speed, film grain, density, etc. Thanks to my father's teaching and passing on of his love of photography, I gained more appreciation for the details behind nature and art, and have done some photography and graphic design jobs and competitions.

Welcome to the Open Source World

"Open source is inevitable." I absolutely love this line, which is the first sentence on RedHat's Open Source Now website under the section of "What is Open Source?" It goes on to explain that open source "returns control to the customer. The code is open and you can see it, change it, learn from it. Bugs are more quickly found and fixed. And when customers don't like how one vendor is serving them, they can choose another without overhauling their infrastructure. That means: No more arbitrary pricing. No more technology lock-in. No more monopolies."

I strongly believe that open source is a great philosophy for software development and a poignant way of tackling life in general. Great advances in society will be made if we collaborate on tackling problems together, whether they are programming goals or goals for humanity, and get ourselves out of selfish mindsets of purely making something to make money where we never look outside our own little boxes to the bigger picture.