It started with an Apple IIe, I suppose.  When Mrs. Wandless showed me how to pop a disk into the drive, type in some commands, then run a program, I was hooked.  I wrote some programs for school projects, figured out how to get QBasic to play the KU fight song, and showed kids how to hide their Wolfenstein 3D installations from the prying eyes of our eight-grade teachers.

I slowly drifted away from computers during high school.  Photography, chess, trombone, running, and friends took time, and I just didn’t have the urge to do more than type up my papers and play a game or two with friends.  I discovered the beauty of an always-on Internet connection when I went off to college, and spent plenty of time surfing the web, but didn’t take things much further.

In my senior year of college, I was feeling pretty down.  I felt like there was a side of me that not even my family or friends really could see–Who’s my favorite musician?  What’s my favorite jazz recording?  Why do I think the way I do?–and I got this crazy idea to build a website.  How to do it?  Learn HTML, right?

I learned HTML, and found out pretty quickly that I needed some more tools to get my website online: a web host and an FTP client.  Check.  What if I want my own domain name?  How do I do that?  I found a hosting company and got busy uploading.  I wanted my site to look a little nicer, so I tried my hand at learning CSS.  All it takes is a text editor and a good book, right?

After I got my website up, I stumbled across a book by a British author, John Naughton, called A Brief History of the Future.  As much as any book could, it chronicled the birth of the Internet from its origins in the Arpanet, packet switching, RFCs, and the MIT AI Lab, and traveled on to the birth of the Web at CERN, the first web browsers, and the beginnings of e-commerce.  I came away thinking, “Here’s a group of people like me–slightly irreverent, slightly timid, tongue-in-cheek optimists who blur the boundaries between play and engineering.  People who don’t want to step on toes, so they title their paper ‘Request for Comments.’”  Naughton’s message was that the real power of the Internet is to lower communication barriers between people, to make it easier for people’s voices to be heard.  And I took it to heart.

So… I’ve got a website.  How do I set up a test version?  Web servers run on Linux?  Guess I’d better learn.  Slowly but surely, I pieced together enough knowledge–managing servers, compiling Linux kernels (remember when USB didn’t work out of the box?), teaching myself networking–to land a job half a continent away in Boston.  I’ve been here ever since.  It’s not always a romantic job: there are times when I really don’t want to see a computer when I come home.  I enjoy digging into new technology though, and I enjoy figuring out how things work on their most basic level.  Here’s hoping I can shed some light on that.  FIN/ACK, FIN/ACK.