All about me.
Hello all! This is me (before i grew a beard, that is).
And this is me now. It's funny what some facial hair will do to you, huh?
Anyway, time for some info. I've been on this blog long enough that any of my regular readers have probably pieced it all together anyway, but some of you may not know, may not care, or whatever :)
It was cold and stormy night. The wind howled through the trees, dislodging the occasional pine cone from the top branches. Lightning flashed repeatedly, displaying silhouettes of ravens, bats, and the occasional garbage truck. Somewhere in the world, a little baby was crying, insistently, probably for a nice warm nipple to suck. Somewhere else in the world, two cats were probably doing it under a dumpster.
In a suburb of London, a tiny baby was born. This baby was born to a karate instructor and a milkman. They broke up when the baby was 11 years old, but the child stayed with it's mother. After going to a nice catholic school, and then studying drama, this young person found their calling and joined the Spice Girls.
Oh wait. That's Baby Spice. I always get our births mixed up - we were born on the same day, you see.
While young Emma was being born, I was in a remote part of Adelaide (South Australia) causing my mother no end of stomach pain. She eventually got over, and here I was, fresh and new in the world. So many new things to try out! Smells, sights, tastes! What will I do first? I'm pretty sure my decision was to eat. I don't know for sure that that's how it happened, but based on my life so far, it wouldn't surprise me.
I grew up in an Air Force family. My dad had been in the RAAF since he left school, with no plan in sight of getting out. As a result, myself and my two sisters (one older, one younger) moved around a lot as he got posted from RAAF base to RAAF base.
- Moved to Melbourne, Victoria when I was two weeks old.
- Moved to Wagga Wagga, NSW when I was 3.
- Moved to the U.S. of A. when I was 3 weeks shy of 5. Alexandria, in Virginia, to be precise.
- Moved back to Melbourne when I was about a month shy of 6.
- Moved to Sale, Victoria when I was 8.
- Moved to Canberra, ACT when I was 10
- Moved to Euroa, Victoria when I was 15
- Moved back to Canberra, ACT when I was 17
- Stayed here ever since.
Up until when I was 15 years old, my plans with myself were to be a Maths teacher. I loved Maths. Mmmm, mmm! Yummy! I'd met computers in Year 8, but Maths was still my thing. While in Euroa, I really played with computers, and began to enjoy them.
In Year 11 (the second time round - we moved back to Canberra because, while I'd done Year 11 there, the public school system in Victoria is crapola, so I wanted to go back to Radford - my old school in Canberra) I took my first proper computing class, and was taught to program for the first time (this does not include the old standard that I'm sure every computer geek types into an Apple IIe while sitting bored at school:
10: Print "Hello"
20: GoTo 10
Almost immediately, my interest in Maths waned. It almost came back again when I read the Necroscope books, but not quite enough to capture my information quite enough to give up computers.
And so came the birth of Geek-Geoff.
Since then, there's really only a little bit worth mentioning.
I went to Uni, studying Computer Engineering. To my surprise, this degree was about hardware - I don't want to learn how to build a computer from scratch, I don't want to analyze how data is passed along the bus...I want to code!!! So my first year there was spent wasting my time, mostly. I learned about the net, I learned about MUDs, I taught myself C so I could run my own MUD. That was about it, besides working as a KFC delivery driver, and, later, working the graveyard shift at a service station.
So I switched to a Bachelor of Information Technology. I started this three year course in February of 1997. I graduated (finally) in June of 2003. Whoops :)
The reason for spending so long is that I went ultra-part-time at the end of 97 while working full time at my shiny new computing job at tSA Consulting (now known as Intology). It was fun, where I got to play with many interesting and involved languages and systems. I got to work on some cool stuff, like developing the first version of Klarity among other things.
Recently I decided it was time to move on. I spent five and a half years there, and I owe them a lot, but it just felt like the right time. So here I am now, doing pretty much the same sort of stuff (writing code) but against much larger databases, and working mostly in the space that I've come to love - the business layer. But now my employer isn't a small ISV, it's Telstra (the biggest Telco in Australia).
Personally, things are looking pretty nice. I'm married now to a wonderful woman, and we have a beautiful daughter. There's another one on the way (currently designated 'frog' until a name is bestowed on it in roughly July). It took us a while to get this point, with a few shaky starts (with other people) then a really shaky start with each other, but we got there in the end.
So now I'm a married man, getting older (at time of writing, I'll be turning 29 in 4 days), starting to go bald, I need to lose weight.
But I'm a geek. And I love it. :)