orbitzOG 2001

Registered way back in March 2001 but silent for over two years, he finally showed up in May 2003 to do something no one else on eZabel had ever attempted: teach C++ through forum comments. When ok4now posted a journal entry struggling with pointers and function parameters, orbitz dove in with the kind of detailed, patient-but-blunt code review that most people pay tutor rates for. Across five massive comments — averaging over 1,200 characters each, earning him The Essayist badge — he walked through pointer arithmetic, parameter passing, function prototypes, compiler standards, and the eternal debate over void main() versus int main() (he was firmly in the int main() camp and would not be moved). He recommended Thinking In C++ by Bruce Eckel, called out Microsoft for refusing to make a conforming compiler, and delivered corrections with a programmer's directness: "Nobody likes to answer peoples questions if they can't even do the research themselves." His sixth and final comment, on a July 4th photo album, was a simple "Some of these pictures are really beautiful and vivid" — a jarring shift from the man who had just written a thousand-word treatise on why int& would make sense after pointers clicked.

eZabel Personality Type: INTJ — "The Code Reviewer." He waited two years to say anything, and when he finally did, it was a graduate-level C++ seminar delivered through journal comments. Then he complimented some photos and vanished. Efficiency.