Kahlerisms

Me!

The following is a post i wrote on the MacTalk forum in response to a ‘how did you become a geek’ question. I think it’s the closest thing I’ve ever written to an ‘About Me’ page, so here it is:

I used to sit at my parents old Amstrad C64 and type pages of code into it so I could play hangman. I should pull it out one of these days and see if it still goes.

Around ‘92 my parents got a 486/66DX (That’s right, on-board maths co-processor!) running 3.1. I remember playing X-Wing and Tie Fighter on it (still the best space/flight sims I’ve played) and the overwhelming excitement that was getting a dialup game of Heretic or Doom going with friends. I think this is where I really became geekified as these things often didn’t work out of the box.

Perhaps I’d need to create a boot disk with different memory settings to play Tie Fighter, or I’d delete half of Windows trying to install a game.

Breaking the beige box on the desk that your parents just paid $2k for was a scary experience, so I’d always have to figure out how to fix it, generally by myself.

Then came the BBS scene, both local and international to a lesser extent.

Turns out not only could you dial in to your mate and play doom but you could connect to bulletin boards and talk shit with a dozen other people. This was FANTASTIC. I was addicted to online chat by 13.

The bulletin board scene brought with it meets (I remember the last Scene meet in around 94 or 95. Bunch of dudes in trenchcoats and goatees talking about how cool 56k modems would be – ah those were the days).
BBS’s also introduced me to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) MajorMUD was the game of the day and was basically an epic-sized online text based rpg that you could ’script’ (i.e. get the computer to play for you while you were at school/work so you were capable of doing more fun things when you were actually at keys). I was addicted to Mud for years (and years). I think I finally gave it away around 2000.

At some point during all this I started an e-zine/ANSI art group and ran my own BBS from an old P100 Toshiba laptop for a couple of years. I remember being paged one day by the guy that ran SiCK (a huge art group at the time). I got to keys just as he logged off. He was one of the gods of the Melbourne or even Australian ’scene’ at the time. I still to this day have regrets I didn’t run a little faster when I heard him paging…

By 2000 eight years had passed since my parents got that 486. I had my own home ethernet network (I ran on coax for a while there) with dedicated boxes for print servers, caching dns, apache web servers, centralised authentication, centralised home drives, a media PC and of course my parents and my self all had our own individual PCs. I was Geekified.

I finished school in 2000, decided to skip uni and go and do some vender certs. 6 months later I was working for the federal government on a huge rollout and I’ve bounced from job to job since.

In essense, it was the need to understand things, fix things, and even break things that makes me a geek. Geeks not need to be necessarily involved in technology – indeed their are Soccer geeks and F1 geeks – to me, a geek is a person with an obsession about a certain thing. It’s more than a hobby, more than an occupation – it’s an obsession that takes up all waking (and some sleeping!) hours.

A couple of years ago I discovered how relaxing being a user was – that’s when I went Mac. I didn’t want the complication of choosing an operating system at boot. I didn’t want the frustation of tweaking everything to make it work or finding obscure drivers for shit.

I consolidated half a rack worth of old servers (which are now for sale – see my other thread) into one combined adsl modem/router thingy. I’ve down-scaled massively and live a slightly simpler life for it, although I still thoroughly enjoy creating NAT rules in IP Tables or virtual domains in Apache when I get the chance

Inspiration along the way?

Kevin Mitnick, Emmanual Goldstein and the 2600 crew, for keeping the idea of being a ‘hacker’ and a true geek alive, all the guys in ‘the scene’ back in the day, the odd sysop or admin here and there..