My first computer was a Coleco Adam some time around age 10. My two brothers an I had already mastered every game made for our Atari 2600, so a computer that played ColecoVision games was a welcome addition. This monster used your TV as a monitor, came with a printer the size of a small oven, and had no hard drive– it read data off regular audio tapes. After the novelty of the games wore off my brothers never touched the thing, and my mom used it only for printing out her weekly grocery lists. I took it over as my very own and taught myself the basics of BASIC. I remember spending all night typing in binary code from the back of my Mad Magazine so I could see an all green and black rendition Alfred E Neuman.

Fast forward a few years and I’m in high school, spending all night trying to get our 386 to connect its noisy 2400 baud modem to the local University’s library. I didn’t really care about looking up books, I just wanted to see if this modem thing worked the way the library pamphlet promised. I grew up in a rural area on the outskirts of Tampa, remote enough that “going into town” was a big deal. So when our computer screen was showing me the contents of a computer a 30 minute drive away, I got excited. I would “Press N for the next page of results” and it worked. I hit the N key, my computer digested it and sent it over the phone line to the computer at the University, and that computer found the next 10 results and sent them back to my computer over the phone line. All this happened in about a second, and even though it was just text on a screen, I was amazed. It was my first experience with action-at-a-distance.

A few years later I’m in undergraduate school studying to be a Civil Engineer. I’d used email for a few years by then, and even navigated files I’d saved on the University’s servers. But everything I’d done up to that point was via text commands: I’d used fetch and finger and gopher and get and put. But one day there was a computing open house, with a hands-on demo of Mosaic 1.0. Suddenly I didn’t need to know commands to get things done. I could just point my mouse at an underlined word, click, and I’d be taken somewhere. Again, the geek in me was amazed. I knew from this point that computing and “the net” would no longer be confined to engineering labs and bedrooms of geeks.

I finished up school and worked 2 years as an engineer. I hated it pretty much the whole time. I decided to move away from engineering and from Tampa, and made the big move to the big city. I got a job at Teachers College in the IT help desk, based on experience from tech support jobs that paid my way through undergraduate school. After 7 months I moved out of the help desk (thank god) to a position in the LAN team, as a network administrator. I’ve been in the LAN team for over 4 years now, farming servers and making sure web pages pop up when you want them to. Occasionally I work on non-network technology projects for the college like the eBoard.

Since working here, I’ve taken advantage of employee benefits and graduated with an MA in Instructional Technology and Media in May 2003. I keep taking classes, but I’m either too scared or too lazy to commit to the Doctoral program. Either way, I’m really in this for the education and not the certificate.