Late introduction post

I just have the feeling I should write some kind of introduction post and give some information about who I am and what I do. So here it is:

• You can find me everywhere by the nick H3PO.
• I've just finished school and don't have any electronics degree or something, so don't expect pure wisdom and ingeniuity here. I'm just fiddling until things work as I like it.
• Until now, I just used to program things in VB6, which is slowly disappearing. I have to use an XP virtual machine to run the IDE.
• As you can see, I'm programming for Windows. I try switching to linux every once in a while, but currently Win7 RC satisfies all my needs.
• I like bullet lists :P
  

So what is it with this PIC stuff?
I recently built a remote-shutter and timer for my digital camera using the old NE555, the performance was disappointing (20mA consumtion for switching a transistor every 3-180s...) and I felt the need for some refreshing digital stuff. This is when I thought about learning to program a µC.
After reading some comparisons between AVR and PIC, I had the feeling it just wouldn't matter in the beginning, but possibly be a problem in the past choosing the "wrong" platform to learn. In the end, I voted for the PIC because I knew someone with an LPT PIC programmer and some experience.
I had a pretty hard start because I didn't have a parallel port and couldn't get my serial port to talk. I didn't want to buy something either, so I decided to build an USB based programmer according to a design found on sprut.de (German). The programmer itself is powered by a PIC, so I needed a kick-start from my friend who was so kind to burn the programmer firmware to my first PIC18F2550.

The circumstances my future projects are based on:

• My burner is the Brenner8mini-P from sprut.de suitable for all 5V models with 11-13V programming voltage
• I'm using the free version of the Microchip C18 Compiler and MPLAB. I haven't had any experiences with any kind of C yet.
  
• On most of my breadboard photos, you'll see my ICSP connection to the burner with orange being DATA, brown CLOCK and yellow Vpp
• Before trying my first programs, I read the datasheet and some information about incorporating an ICSP header into a circuit. In the end, I came up with this basis breadboard which enables my burner to power the pic for the time of programming:

So far. Enjoy yourselves building things. Please leave comments if you like what I post and share your thoughts on corrections and improvements.