About Me

AKA: How I Fell In Love With Technology

I love computers and technology. It started from a very young age. As a kid I would take everything apart just to see how it worked. I didn't always get things back together and when I did, sometimes I had 'extra parts'.

When I was a bit older, I used to go into the office with my dad on the weekends when no-one was around and I would poke around on the computers to figure out what they could do. These computers were running Dos and Windows 3.1. When you booted them up they would boot to Dos and then you would have to type 'win' to start Windows. I started messing around with them and figured out that the Autoexec.bat file automatically ran commands when the computer booted up. I found this facinating. I started adding what thought were funny messages to the screen output like 'I am the human, and YOU are the computer!'. Then I discovered that I could create my own .bat files and started creating my first 'programs'. The first one I created ran the dir command and then ran itself again. This caused an endless scroll of the directory contents of the working directory, and for extra fun I named the file win.bat and saved it to the default directory that you would be in when the computer booted to Dos. This meant that when the unsuspecting user of the computer came in on Monday, booted it up, and typed win to start Windows they just got the endless scroll. I never heard about the experiences or was questioned about if I had been messing with things.

A little later we finally got a computer at home. This was amazing. I played Doom for hours. It gave me bad dreams about those brown gorilla looking monsters.

Then we got a dial-up internet plan. My mind was blown by all the amazing things available. I signed up for an email address at rocketmail and also at hotmail. My mom freaked out when I told her I signed up for an account at hotmail.com. She heard 'hot-male.com'. XD

A friend created a webpage at angelfire.com and sent me a link to it. I spent so long looking at other people's web pages and then looking at the source code to see how they did the things they were doing. And then I started making my own sweet websites, by copying bits of code from all my favorite sites.

Most of my computer use for a long time after that was spent looking at cool things on the internet, talking to friends and strangers, registering cool domain names, creating websites and trying different email systems.

I started off just using the free email hosting provided by the Website hosting provider I was using and I would access it via Pop3. I used it like that for a long time, until Google opened registration for the "Google Apps" service where you could use your own domain. I signed up and used that for about 10 years until the limitations of it frustrated me too much. I then used a forwarding system to get my mail in my regular gmail account, and used smtp with my web host to send mail. I still had some problems with this setup. A couple of years ago, I switched to using fastmail.com for my email hosting and have been very happy with them. Maybe one day I will be brave/stupid enough to try to run my own email server.

Throughout my teens, I heard about Linux and I tried it out a couple of times. But it never quite worked well enough on my computers to really use it for any extended amount of time. In 2004 I heard about Ubuntu and tried it out. Everything just worked, except for wifi (insert angry face), but it was a desktop computer that was plugged in via ethernet so that didn't matter too much.

I've been hooked on Linux and open source software ever since. I love the idea of open source software. It brings me back to the huge dopamine rush I had as a kid when I realized I could right click on a webpage and "view source". I could see the code that made the magic happen, and I could be a magician too!

I spent the next five years as a truck driver, driving 18-wheelers. I spent all of my driving hours listening to tech podcasts and when I parked my truck for the night I would be on my computer, trying things I heard about during the day.

I got married in 2010. On our honeymoon, we decided that I was going to quit my truck driving job and go back to school. My lovely partner supported us while I spent the next 2 years in school at a local community college. To help make ends meet while in school, I started a side business doing computer repair. Most of my customers were other students and professors at my college. I also delivered car parts from a parts store to mechanic shops. I graduated with an AAS in Local Area Network Administration.

My favorite professor at school was the professor of my Unix and Unix 2 classes. His name was Professor Michael Martino and he was such a great teacher and mentor. He had worked in the tech industry for a long time and had a lot of contacts in the industry. Every semester he would hold a Virtual Job Fair, where you would submit your resume to him and he would reach out to his contacts in the industry to try to help students to get started in their new careers. With his connections, I was hired before I even graduated.

These days I am working as a Linux System Administrator and I have a hard time imagining a better job. I primarily support Red Hat systems. The only thing that would make my job better is if we switched all of our servers to Debian instead.

Tech things that get my dopamine going:

• Linux
• Open source software
• Self hosting and homelabs
• Retro technology
• Repurposing and refurbishing old tech
• Automation
• Bash scripting
• Python coding