About Me & This Site

After several years of starting this site and never getting it up on the web I have finally got it going. Welcome, and I hope my posts help you get a little more out of your computer.

A Brief History

I am a technology enthusiast who enjoys helping others get the most out of the tech in their everyday lives. My interest started in middle school when I purchased the closest thing I had used to a computer. A Texas Instruments TI-82 graphing calculator. In no time I was cranking out programs left and right to do everything from helping me with my homework to just killing time in study hall. This lasted a few years until right before I started high school when I received my first computer, which was actually given to me by a close friend and neighbor. It was a 16MHz system, on turbo, with 8MB of ram and a 100MB hard drive. It ran Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and I probably reinstalled everything on it at least 10 times in the span of a year.

Right before high school my neighbor introduced me to HTML and the web. I took to it quickly and was making dorky little websites for everything I could think of. Until I realized I had a big enough project to play with. Two friends and I were all into video games and one of them had a knack for creating the cheat codes used by the Gameshark and soon after the Codebreaker and the Action Replay. So naturally I used my interest in web sites to create us a little community for his codes. This site ended up being the site I tested all of the new things I learned as I got into web development. During high school my family received a computer from my uncle which put my older system to shame. It had around a 300MHz processor, 32MB of ram, and a 2GB hard drive. It ran Windows 98 SE and by this time I was much better at exploring without causing enough damage that I had to reinstall it every month.

In my junior and senior years I had some help from a classmate learning Javascript. This was the first scripting language I learned. It allowed me to start moving away from just static content. For instance I could write one page header and include it in all of my pages. Little did I know that my use just scratched the surface of its capabilities. During this time I also participated in a project where three classmates and I built and maintained a small domain controlled network. We ended up winning first place at the Tech Prep Regional Showcase and second place at the State showcase.

The summer just before I started college I got my first current generation computer. I used my graduation money to purchase a laptop with a 800MHz processor, 128MB ram, and a 10GB hard drive running Windows ME. I also found out about the actual scripting languages behind most web applications and set out to teach myself PHP. PHP is debated to be one of the best and most widely used languages for web application development. By the end of the summer I had gotten a fairly good grasp on it and had some small data driven applications up and running.

I ended up being quite disappointed in my experience with my web development classes in college. The things we covered were sorely out of date and the teacher skipped right over PHP claiming that it wasn’t important enough. I did however get a lot out of other classes. My business and database classes helped me a great deal and I made up for the web development by purchasing books outside of school and teaching myself all the techniques I use today. The first year into it I had saved up enough to get a new family desktop. It was a Dell Dimension 2.4GHz, 512MB ram, and an 80GB hard drive running Windows XP. College was also the time during witch I got into the Macintosh. I ended up selling my laptop and getting an iBook. It became my primary system but I did still use my Dell and I later decided to duel boot it with Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.