Richard Thomas

I had given up too but yesterday I looked at all 30xx series cards on Scan (UK) and to my surprise there was stock of Zotac Trinity RTX 3090 OC's. Nothing else though. I did think about it for a minute or too as I was looking for a 3080 but I did need a new GPU since upgrading the rest of my PC last summer and I thought ah only live once and spent a fortune on securing my order. My credit card got a hammering, Arrived today. Amazing! Back out of stock now.

Was born and grew up in Cardiff, Wales where I taught myself the basics of computer programming as I turned a teenager firstly by typing in a load of peeks and pokes into my Commodore 64 and then thinking I would like to learn what these actually do and visited the central library umpteen number of times to loan out computer programming books on the subject of BASIC. A year or so later I was lucky enough to have given an Amiga 600 (a year later an Amiga 1200) for Christmas and set to work teaching myself AMOS (free cover disk on one of the Amiga magazines at the time) and saved up my pocket money and bought AMOS Professional. I had great fun with AMOS as it was a development on my knowledge of BASIC. After High School I attended college and took a computer programming course which taught the basics using Pascal before moving onto COBOL and focusing in on C, if I remember correctly we used Borland Turbo C for MS-DOS. Whilst at College I managed to obtain SAS C and taught myself C on the Amiga which was fun. I also dabbled a little in 68K and 8x86 Assembly but only a little and can't remember a thing twenty years later! :-) After college I left the world of programming behind me and went into 1st Line Tech Support on a ISP Helpdesk before moving onto 1st Line Tech Support on a Shared Hosting Platform. This then led onto 2nd Line for the same Shared Hosting Platform where I re-kindled my passion for coding and bought myself a book on PHP as we were also responsible for 1st Line support for integrating our payment card system with customers code. It was great, I was able to use the knowledge gained write basic scripts that made static web pages a thing of the past. Over the coming years I kept up my PHP knowledge and am now conversant in PHP using OOP techniques in an MVC environment (I prefer using my own MVC framework but have used various frameworks like Cake) using MySQL as my DB of choice. I also taught myself jQuery as I needed to start integrating my PHP code with Ajax calls. Back eight years ago (around 2006) I did teach myself C# using Visual Studio 2005 and made my first and only game. It wasn't anything original, just Connect 4 but my then girlfriend (now wife) thought it was fabulous and had it on her computer for quite some time. Didn't really do much with C# after this but have, in the last month, signed up on Visual Studio Online for a Professional Licence. This gives me the full Visual Studio 2013 Professional IDE and am currently working through the latest ADO.NET Entity Framework Step by Step book to bring myself up to speed with technologies such as LINQ. IDE's I currently use are PHP Storm (7.1) for PHP development and Visual Studio 2013 Professional. I also use MySQL Workbench and SQL Server 2012 Management Studio and I mention these as I suppose they could be classed as IDE's for their respective DB engines. I don't work as a Developer or Designer (I couldn't design to save my life) but am still in the IT industry as Data Centre Manager for a large Telecommunications company in the UK. Coding remains a hobby of mine and I do have ideas in the pipeline for a project based around a Windows C# WPF Application.