Background
I'm a odd kind of guy. Most kids start off wanting to be a fireman when they're growing up. Me, I wanted to be an electrical engineer. When I was 6. Like I said: odd. From 6 to 9 I was busy etching circuit boards on the family room table. Staining various table cloths with the ferric chloride chemistry. Not that I got many working things at that age, but that's what I wanted to do. I was also a loner for a lot of my growing up. My parents weren't really together a lot. My dad var variously in Florida or California mainly. He didn't really like Cleveland a whole lot at all. When he was in Florida we visited him a few times driving down in a Honda Civic. My mom was busy with work and taking care of her parents and generally being a nervous wreck. I learned that if I wanted to get something done it was my job to do it.
Computers
When I was 9 my parents got me a TI99/4a computer. That changed everything. Now I wanted to be a programmer. Haven't really looked back since then. A litany of computers followed:
- TI99/4a
- Commodore 64
- Commodore 128
- Commodore Amiga 500
- Borrowed 286 clone
- 386/25MHz
- 486/33MHz
- Pentium/90MHz
- Pentium II
- Pentium III
- Athlon X64 4400+ (2.2GHz)
- MacBook (White 2008) (quickly given to Ennie)
- MacBook Pro (Late 2008)
- iMac (Late 2009) Quad core Intel Core i7/2.8GHz
- MacBook Air (Late 2010)
- iMac (Late 2012) Core i7 @ 3.4 GHz with 32GB memory
- MacBook Pro Retina (Late 2013)
- Home-brew Windows 7 Core i5 running the trainer
There might be one or two I'm forgetting... but that's my collection over time.
The days of the BBS
When I was around 13 I found out about modems. I had the Commodore 64 at the time and I borrowed a 300bpd modem from school. I quickly outgrew that and convinced my mom to get me the 1200bps one to replace it. (I still have have modem) By this time I had my own phone line since I was talking on the phone all the time like the proverbial teenage girl. A slow download later and I was the sysadmin of Ground Zero BBS. I met a lot of people through that. It really helped bring me out of my shell. I think this deserves it's own page.
School
...sigh... this is mainly a low-point. I went to grade school at St. Gregory in South Euclid. It was meh at it's best. High school was split between Benedictine for two years and a day and Cleveland Heights for the balance of the two years. After that I went to Cleveland State for four quarters and OSU for another quarter. It was a frustrating experience. I wasn't learning much at all. I stopped that before my loans got out of hand. It was a good decision.