Born and raised in southern California, I started my geek addiction early. It all started with an Apple IIc that my parents had bought for a business. Ironically they didn’t use it for work much, but I cut my teeth on BASIC programming there. I took my first typing class when I was in middle school. Finally I logged into EW-Too talkers in the mid-90s to chat with folks all over the world. That snowballed into IRC. It’s amazing how fast you can learn to type when you want to have full-blown coversations with people.

My first computer job was working in a law office. I didn’t have much with keeping the computers online, but I did a lot of research using their Lexus Nexus software. From there it was customer support for a title company. There were WYSE terminals, green screens, and shell scripting. I figured out that I could take a handful of commands that I ran frequently and put them in a script. Oh yes, that was the start. I even remember my first battle with parsing a file that was ultimately solved with a couple lines of awk provided by a friend at the time. Who would have though that a short awk script would spark a love for programming that burns even today.

Fast forward to the last few years. My current job is as a road warrior for a company based in Austin, TX. It’s played hell with my weight, which I’ve always fought to lower/maintain, and so the battle rages on to get it back down to a level where I’m able to do the things I enjoy again. More on that over at geekfit.com.

This Knol thing is pretty interesting. I sat and read through a few of them and they all seemed to be posted by doctors and professors. I wonder what I could write about. I certainly have the experience in a few areas–hm, maybe a post about learning new things? That’s a challenge sometimes.