Feet Have Been

I am a geek.

That’s why, no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to keep tech out of my personal blog. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean I get reprimanded (albeit gently) for continually sneaking it in. I just can’t help it though.

I started with computers way back, when I was probably in grade 8. At least, that’s when I started seriously working with them. Before then I had always had a strange affinity for them. Without ever actually using a computer my typing speed was awesome, and I found ways around our elementary school’s firewall system. I didn’t know what I was doing then, it was just a fun game. They had something I wanted, so I took it without anyone getting hurt. It was all fun and games. And the fun and games is what led me to start pursuing HTML development.

Sidenote: Around this time I also got in to pirating. I didn’t know what pirating software or music was, but I did know that there was tons of free stuff out there if you took the time to look. IRC had tons of people willing to send you things, and I embraced that side of it. I never actually knew what I was doing at the time, it was just a neat trick.

A friend of mine lived in the same apartment building as me at the time, and he used to play a game called Neopets. Naturally being the bored kid on dial-up that I was, I itched to play some sort of online game. So I did. I got into Neopets. And I liked it. I had tons of money and helped out newbies.. I even went so far as to create a guild page. And then I realized, man, there’s only so much you can do with the basic guild page. It bugged me that these guys could make such awesome guild pages and I was stuck with the basics.. how did they do it?

And so it begins

D, or so he shall be named, introduced me to HTML. He was younger than me by a couple years, but he was far more internet savvy that I ever was. He was also a gamer. He entered into the whole tech side of things a lot sooner than I ever had. I devoured HTML. I spent hours learning how to do the simplest things. I registered for my geocities account, and then my freewebs account. And I had tons of fun doing it. I was churning out crapping websites left right and center, and I thought I was awesome.

Then I was in high-school. And I got cable internet. And things just spiraled out of control for me. Forget school work, I’d spend hours every day just researching random internet things. Google was new, I loved it. So was gmail. I was one of the first up there, had to pay someone to get an account and everything. Again, I began looking into others things..CSS for example, hardware, software. Anything relating to website development I loved.

But still something was missing. I mean, sure I could use tables and HTML and CSS to make a website, but there were some awesome looking websites out there. And paint wasn’t cutting it. Sitting there making gradients (before I knew what they were called) by hand was tough. Line after line of ever so slightly shifting color produced the smallest gradients. But I was proud of my work.

Another friend, well versed in the design side of things introduced me to Photoshop. I installed it and ran through some tutorials and started pumping out the worst signatures possible. But again, I was happy. I was doing something not many people knew (or not many people I knew at least) how to do. But even I could see that my signatures weren’t the best. I wanted to get better. So I learned everything I could about websites and photoshop. I went through hundreds of tutorials, spending countless hours and all my nights for years working on it. I had no social life, and I didn’t need one. I was fast on my way to becoming a geek, even though at the time I had no connection to the word.

Eventually I teamed up with another friend who was also into website design. His designs at the time were a lot better than mine (which I contribute to his being at artist) but my coding skills were far better .We entered a partnership. He would make layouts, I would turn them into sites, and we would offer them to people for free. Not many people wanted our layouts, and looking I could definitely see why. They were just plain ugly.

But no matter. I would get better.

And I did. I found PHP and worked with that for a while, learned about FTP protocols and how to connect to my website remotely. I learned about how to set up my own server on my machine so that when my websites started getting bigger and bigger I could easily test them out on my machine instead of making a bunch of updates, uploading and then waiting to see the results. It saved me time. And the longer I spent working with all these various languages the more I realized I knew nothing at all. And that is what drove me on to learn even more. To keep learning.

Today, almost 10 years later I can sit at my computer write a blog post, working on my game, fix a hardware issue on a machine sitting at my feet and at the same time be researching various methods to accomplish various things with regards to both hardware and software. I can take a few hours out of my day to work on a layout. I’ve learned the subtle touches of someone who has spent countless hours working on their skill.

And I’ve learned that I don’t know a thing. There are millions of people out there who know more than I do. There are people younger than I am that already know much more than I do. But that’s what drives me to keep doing what I do. To keep programming, to keep hacking, to keep being a geek.

Somewhere along the way what I do became easier for me. Things started making sense, and things started clicking. Things that before seemed completely unrelated were suddenly inseparable. I once read somewhere that it takes you 10 years to be good at something. They were right. It takes a long time before you can make the leap from beginner to intermediate. There are many plateau’s that just feel like you’re not going anywhere for months, but you stick to it anyways, knowing that in the end you’ll be where you want.

And that’s partly why the tech side of things consistently prevails in my personal blog. Things are so ingrained in me, that I have no idea what else to do. I write about it. I have ideas of things tech related, I test them out and I have no way to share my findings except by writing about it. I’m damn proud of everything I do and I have no qualms about sharing it.

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