Motivation
Wow!
It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been almost 30 years since I began my career (and life) online.
It all started in 1983. WarGames.
From this point forward I was pretty sure my life would be closely intertwined with computers if I couldn’t be a professional baseball player or an astronaut.
Like many young patriots my age, I wanted to study computers and networking to save the world from Global Thermonuclear War. The fact that I was not a naturally gifted athlete and the Space Shuttle exploded live on tv had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision.
Not once during Jr High and High School was a class offered that would have any involvement with computers. I can’t remember using a computer ‘at school’ ever beyond making an ascii rocket ship fly up the screen or playing The Oregon Trail a few times a year before I was 10.
My family had an Amiga 500 (which was sweet!) but I was only allowed to use it for word processing and video games. My father forbade me from doing much else with it out of fear I’d break it which would’ve destroyed his nightlife of signing on to Prodigy to look at Lotto numbers.
Early Years
Inside two years of getting that computer (a Compaq Presario 486 DX2/50!) for graduation I was on my second ‘tech’ job. Building a Dial-Up ISP from the ground up with just one other guy. I handled most of the technical side of things and he handled virtually all of the business related matters. As we grew, we merged with another small ISP like us.
Early on I was an active participant in many of the popular technical mailing lists and news groups (USENET) of the time, primarily related to FreeBSD and BSD/OS. I even had a small amount of C code committed to the FreeBSD code base to add a trivial feature to the base OS (and I’m not a programmer!).
I was heavily involved in the Quake / QuakeWorld CTF (Capture the Flag) communities when that game was the hottest thing around. I was an active member in a fairly well-known Quake Clan that released a professional-quality map pack to the community free of charge. I was the ‘sysadmin’ for the Clan, hosting our community-focused strategy and training website until that site became the part of a much larger commercial endeavor.
Middle Years
A decade later I was dragged kicking and screaming to play the MMO World of Warcraft and ended up falling in love just as I did with ThreeWave CTF. I ran the forum for our guild. I created videos to share with our server when we had major accomplishments. I helped run a fairly complex site to help track points to ensure fair loot distribution amongst our members.
Professionally, I spent a lot of time on ServerFault over the years. I love the concept of the site; a ‘StackOverflow style’ site (run by the same company) that was aimed specifically at technical professional. Over time the overt hostility on the site chased me away and I deleted my account. Maybe that last part was dumb because…
Today
I’ve actively spent over 25 years of my life online and I’m a ghost! Doing web searches for my name, the handles I’ve used over the years, searching my own email address leads to almost nothing related to me beyond this web site. The few links I’ve found for this post took ages to find, and I knew exactly what to look for!
It’s almost as if I was never here and I hope to change that.
Welcome to my blog.