New Old Guy here

Hey everyone. New to the forum here. My online identity I normally use is CigarMan (since 1993, but mostly BBS's back then other than the DARPA net). Since the name is more common now and not always available, I have also used Stogie and cman_gamer. Yes I like my cigars and have for about 21 years now. I didn't start smoking them until I was 30, so yeah, I am an old guy.

Long time PC gamer starting in late 80's. Played in many online leagues with Quake3 and the mod "Urban Terror". Ran a fun online clan called Silicon Soldiers for several years playing the Battlefield series, CoD, and Desert Combat. The team had several other games they played the biggest being the Star War Galaxy with over 200 players around the globe. I ran the forum, teamspeak and game servers (they were in the colo that I worked at).

Never played a console until Nov 2005 when visiting my oldest son before his unit shipped out to Iraq that December. They had two xboxes with two 40" crt tv's back to back playing Halo. Got my butt kicked all morning as I was so used to keyboard/mouse and not a gamepad. Once I started to get the hang of the gamepad and started placing higher and higher each game, the boys all had other things to do. Found out later from my daughter-in-law, that they could not handle losing to someones "Dad". I got them back a few days later in the gym. Put them through my workout and they could hardly walk the next few days. They are all soldier, I did two tours in the Marine Corps. Its all in good nature as my dad was Navy and my ex-wife retired from the Air Force.

I now have owned consoles from the past five years and I can use a gamepad pretty good on both my xbox and ps3. I started with CoD4 on PS3 and went to MW2 when it was first released. That was also my first time standing out in the cold all damn night waiting for the midnight release at Gamestop. About 7-to-8 months after getting the PS3, I bought the MW2 Xbox 360. Played MW2 on it for comparison to the PS3 and I have been playing all of my shooters on it since. This past summer I upgraded to the slim, so I have both xbox's side-by-side on seperate TV's.

Anyway, I mostly play offline now as the area I live only has a slow Clearwire wireless connection that is crappy for FPS gaming (urban area not part of the city). Played a lot of BadCo2, BF3, MW3 and then was introduced to GoW3. I was hooked. I've played all of the Halo's except WaW (bad internet connection). I started playing Borderlands 2 a few months back and have spent a lot of hours building my characters. Spend a weekend playing Halo4 and another playing CoD:BOps2, but I spend all of my time on BL2 now.

I have only ever played single characters before and this time I wanted to play with two players to see if the loot was better and so I created a second profile and rented a second BL2 disc from Redbox and had both xbox's going at once. I built a strong second character doing that. Later I figured out that I could have more than one character on a single profile but that has been a lot of time spent recreating my second profile character on my first profile. Then....I found your website from some youtube videos and that I could copy my character from second profile to my main profile. So, here I am.

I think I have spent about 10 hours just reading posts here, there is so much great info here, its amazing. I downloaded some saved games and the modding tools and will try those later on. I have 2 laptops and a netbook all running linux, not a windows on any of them. I will have to build a virtual image to run to use the mod tools that you have available from here. Then, once I get them figured out I will go back and show my likes for all the work the members here have put in building these files.

I am mostly a lurker, but will answer any questions that fall within my area of knowledge which is 30 years working in the computer industry, mostly with military contractors, but a lot of internet (civilian) contract work during the past 10 years.

I know its a long first post but I'm on my second Rockstar Recovery drink, so I tend to rant on...and on...and on while speeding along. ;-)


Edit Addition:

Just read another post seeing that the site is from the UK. I was in East Anglia from 1996-2000. My now ex-wife was at RAF Mildenhall and I worked out of RAF Feltwell. I was a senior network admin and I supported system from Cornwall, London Central, Alconbury, Mildenhall, Lankenheath, Feltwell in the UK to the Nato bases in Iceland and Belgium, and US forces based in Germany, Rota Spain, and Tercera Islands Portugal.