At the early age of 5, I was already taking things apart. I always wanted to know how things worked. Specifically electronic items. I remember taking apart old radios, televisions and anything I could get my hands on. My parents tell me that every house I went to, I always counted the number of AC outlets!

My curiosity continued as I grew up, and unfortunately I never could put back together or make any of those old electronics work- though I did once repair a telephone. Elementary and high school did not offer much in the way of technical coursework.

My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. My parents bought it mostly for the games. It had a whopping 16k RAM and 26k of ROM, and ran Basic. You can see an example here: http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html . In elementary school we had Commodore 64 http://www.vintage-computer.com/commodore64.shtml and then eventually upgraded to the Apple IIe and then Mac+'s.

Sometime in High School, my parents bought a "new" computer. They saw the need to produce reports and such on a computer instead of a typewriter. We ended up with a Tandy (Rado Shack) DeskMate. For it's time it was good- It was some proprietary operating system with a word processor and organizer. It had a whopping 640k of RAM and had the 80286 processor chip. Was great for it's day and got a lot of use.

In high school we pretty much used the Apple PowerPC's that came out. I had the honor of putting our yearbook into electronic format for the first time, and was the creator of the high school's first website. Fun with PageMill and Claris software.

I had been working and saving money during high school, so I went and purchased myself a Mac Performa 6360. It had a 160Mhz Power PC chip and 16MB RAM. I met a lot of resistance buying it, as everyone was moving to a PC, as this was an era when Microsoft had come out with Windows 95 and 98 and Apple was just not keeping up. It served me well for many years.

After high school, I attended and graduated from Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) with a degree in electronics systems. During my time there, I had to use PC's and Windows. This was the first time I started actually getting more interested in computers than just using them as a tool. However, I stuck with the Electronics program and searched for jobs in that field. Along the way I started subscribing to the IT industry trade magazines and learned from them, as well as books. I created my own website for the first time, and started helping others with desktop applications.

I finally got a job at a small manufacturing company in Franklin County. For three years I built and repaired electronic and mechanical assemblies. Along the way I got interested in the network operating system the company used. It was Novell's Netware. They pretty much did not have an IT department- it was done by a consultant, and then by a software developer when he had the time. On my own, I took courses to be a CNE (Novell Engineer), and became certified in 2002. At that time I had a bit more involvement in the IT of the company- we purchased "real" servers, I moved all the files and services successfully, which became my first major IT project. I was also involved in NT domain and Netware account synchronization project. I also became the primary "help desk" guy, and setup and installed 20 new workstations into the environment.

In 2004, I started doing private consulting to individuals and companies. I have done network setups, server setups, integrations and more. I still work for the same little manufacturing company, but I am on my own, as many people have moved on. I am responsible for 30 servers, half of which are virtualized (one of my projects). I also just completed a major upgrade of Netware from 4.11 to 6.5. I work daily in a mixed Windows, Linux, Macintosh & Netware environment. Every day I learn something new, and truly enjoy the work.