About
Software Engineer by day, nerd by night! Well, nerd most of the time.
On Sunday, June 14th of 2009, I graduated from The Ohio State University College of Engineering with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I moved the following Wednesday and now work, live, and play in Tucson, Arizona! I am still in the process of spreading my wings and getting involved in Tucson, but I’m sure that will be complete soon!
Computer Fascination
In 1996(ish) my Dad bought our first “family” computer. I say “family” because I used it more than everyone else combined. I ran up HUGE phone bills connecting long distance for an additional 1kb/sec dial-up connection and played SimCity and Need For Speed more than the game creators probably intended.
Around the age of 12 (1997 – 1998), I became interested in application development and went on to pursue HTML and JavaScript. I spent hours trying to get JavaScript to function as a server-side scripting language, which never worked because JavaScript isn’t a server-side scripting language and I didn’t have a server. Anyway, my sisters started playing Zoombini’s a lot and reduced the amount of time I was allowed to spend on the computer. This did not work well for me and led me to ask for money to buy my own computer for Christmas in 1998. I bought a Dell Dimension XPS 350: an awesome machine running Microsoft Windows 98 on an Intel Pentium II 350MHz processor with 96MB of RAM, an 8GB hard drive, a V.90 modem and hardware DVD decoding. I learned Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.0, Visual Basic for Applications, and dabbled in C/C++. Late in my Windows career, I mastered JavaScript for client-side scripting, PHP for server-side scripting, and SQL for databases.
Computer Obsession
My fascination with computers continued until I found Linux in early 2001. I started with Red Hat Linux 7.1 and played with it for a while until 2005, when I switched from Windows completely – making the official transition from computer fascinated to computer obsessed! I occasionally had to move my Linux partition over so I could install Windows and do some school work that required Windows (yes, it sucked). Now I just use a virtual machine and occasionally play SimCity 4 just for fun. My system is a little faster now, running an Intel Core 2 Quad at 2.44GHz, 4GB of RAM, a total of 1TB disc space spread over 3 drives, and DVD software decoding running Gentoo Linux.
Life Today
Nowadays, I spend most of my time trying to keep up with world events, socializing with friends, exercising, and randomly contributing to Linux forums and such when I have time.