My life with computers and travel

London, UK

This isn't my whole life, this is my life experiences with computers and how traveling has played into that and how computing allowed me to travel a lot more than I would have otherwise.

In 1984, we were living in Fairview, I was 2 years old and being baby sat at the Smith's house. That's when I started playing King Kong on the Atari for the first time. There was a joystick controller attached to the atari and the video displayed on a TV.

In 1987, we had moved to a nice house in Douglas Dale. My Grandma Monika bought Craig a $5,000 286 PC that had DOS, a menu system to pick which programs you wanted to run. It ran in DOS with about 16 colours. Eventually we installed a very early version of windows on it but there was always a going back and forth between DOS and Windows. This didn't stop until Windows 98 came out ten years later.

There was a program that would print out colour line art on to a printer that used colour pens to draw out the lines. I remember my dad printing out a wire frame of a space ship on to A3 paper. I was playing some sesame street games and generally watching what my Dad, Brother and some of our friends and neighbors as they traded around software, hardware and tried out new things.

By 1991, my Dad had lost his job at Shell Oil and we were living back in Fairview. We had a 386 running DOS, Windows 3.1 and OS/2 at one point which fucked up my DOS games. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get them playing after OS/2 had been installed. When we dropped OS/2, I was playing Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, some Sierra and 3D car racing games. We had a BBS for a while and I used to go on to some of the local boards in Calgary. We eventually got a 486 with 16MB of memory and a 512MB SCSI drive. I think the fastest modem we were using was 19.2/KBits.

In 1993, we got the internet at home. It was a phenomenon that came out of no where but suddenly everyone was talking about it. It seemed like a natural evolution from BBSes but this network was international and it didn't matter if you called up a server 20 meters away or on the other side of the world, it all cost the same amount and the speed was the only difference.

We had trumpet winsock installed which allowed us to dial up our ISP and sort out the TCP/IP bits of the connection.

In 1994, we had a 486 and a 386. I was playing a lot of sim city. Later I got into doom, visual basic 3.0 & 4, pascal and rap music. I started to collect CDs at this point. I began to learn HTML and make basic web pages. I had also discovered news groups.

In 1995, I was still on a 486 that was feeling dated. I was working with Cubase and trying out a lot of audio application shareware from Future Music. I was really keen to get into producing music as my big brother was already into it. Future Music was a fascinating magazine from the UK. It came with a CD full of music, shareware and samples and basically, tons of inspiration for someone like myself. It was focused on the UK and Europe which was a real change from the American-focused rap scene that I was already into.

I started to take an interest in Raves at this point. I think the Hackers Movie also came out around this time. Craig was producing music like mad. I went to a friend's place of Craig's and this guy had heaps of music equipment surrounding him. He was 28 and worked for an oil company so he had all the money in the world to invest in his home studio. He gave me a Atari with Cubase to try out sequencing in exchange for my drum machine. The computer crashed constantly.

I worked on music while hanging out with a Hungarian kid and Darren, a chap I met in school. My mom had left my family earlier in the year. I was living in the basement of my Dad's place watching Rap City every day and working with music.

It wasn't long before I started seeing music videos, raves and unique music culture from Europe. Canada's music scene was really sad, if someone made it big, I thought they were shit, everything else seemed weak in comparison to American music. Canada is a peaceful country compared to the US so rapping about violence makes you look like a poser. When they rapped about love making instead, it just sounded rubbish. If they rapped about their everyday struggles in their life, it was boring and I couldn't relate to it.

Also, 8% of Canada population consisted of people of African decent so we ended up with a lot of people of European decent trying to emulate groups like Public Enemy, NWA, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, ect... It was just sad. I felt that rap wasn't "my" music. I liked it, but I wasn't supposed to be fully apart of that culture.

When I got into electronic music, race wasn't an issue and it was mostly european anyway. I really liked it and felt like I had found what made me tick musically.

In the Summer of 1996, I finally got my own computer. A P-166 133MHz Cyrix based machine with Windows 95, 32MB Ram, 1.2GB HHD, 10x CD-ROM and a 33.6 Modem. I was watching beyond 2000, a show from Australia talking about the future. It was on in the middle of the night. The show really inspired me and everyone down there looked more happier (probably because of the weather). I was really into drum and bass for a while. I was playing with lots of shareware and constantly fighting to find drive space on my computer.

I was making music as well but I felt held back because I didn't have a high quality sound bank (i.e. sound module) and my synthesizer was not polymono (I think that's what it's called) which meant it could only play 1 sound or a mix of 2 sounds at once. The previous summer I was fighting just to have a sequencer and now I had one (cubase on my computer) but I didn't have a wide range of sounds and my sampler could only sample up to 14.4 seconds. I would sample notes and drum kits off of cds and map them on to my synth to try and re-create the instruments but the quality wasn't high. I eventually got into lo-fi music which made a point of sounding like everything had been poorly sampled off of cheap non-grounded equipment. It gave the music a bit of an edge which added to the raw emotions that were being conveyed.

One day in the Winter of 1997 I searched for "software" on webcrawler.com and I suddenly discovered the world of HPCAV (hacking, phreaking, cracking, anarchy and virus). More importantly, I learned that Warez and serial numbers existed. Suddenly, full versions of all software were free on the internet and people could try them out and become experts on them without shelling out thousands of dollars on them.

In 1997, almost every application ran as an executable on windows, nothing was online except for documents (i.e. no web applications). Being that the programs were run locally, their copy protections could be broken and they could be shared and modified in anyway people wished. In the age of web applications, unless the source code and database is stolen off the server or you can find a login and password, you can't just "have" the application for free unless it is offered for free.

I quickly discovered ftp servers, what an IP address was, irc, ect... Suddenly, I spent all my time on the computer. This was a big bang. I was living with Jim and my Mom at the time in Bonavista. I soon got cable internet and my drive space problem would never go away again.

I discovered mp2 files and a world of low quality .au file samples online but within a few weeks of seeing an mp2 file, I found mp3s and before I knew it, I had every obscure dance track you could imagine. I finally had a larger view on European music which allowed me to disconnect from American culture more and more. I became obsessed with Portishead. I don't think people in the UK can understand how much I enjoyed their culture. I probably enjoyed it so much more because I hated North American culture so much. It was my only "off button" for everything around me.

In September 1997, I began attending high school and was accepted into the advanced placement for computer sciences programme which gave me a university level education in computers while I was still in high school. If I hadn't been in this class, I would have had been learning this material 3 years later in University. Being in this course also made me realize university is a waste of time for IT graduates and I should just get a good tech job writing code as soon as possible. There was a .com boom in America and in other parts of the world at the time as well. There were a lot of stories of 16 year olds dropping out and making tons of cash.

In the winter of 1998, I was working with music but this was coming to an end. My brother was producing for a guy named Baby-Jay but that feel through as well. At one point Baby-Jay and his Italian friend were hanging out with me. I made them some album covers and we all got into Playstation in a big way. I bought a N64 but I had to rent everything and the games weren't as good as play station. N64 had bilinear filtering and that was it, it lacked everywhere else. It was impossible to copy games without a $200 CD-ROM device from Hong Kong but at the time I couldn't afford $40 games for $200 was way out of my league. Playstation games could be copied off the net and burnt to disc. I really wish I had bought a Playstation instead.

In the summer, I got a Cyrix 300MHz chip upgrade, a new mother board and 128MB of memory. I traded in a few hard drives for a bigger one at that small shop near my Dad's house run by a Ukrainian guy. I was really into Photoshop, Unreal, WinNT and Visual C++. I began working on a n64 emulator which lead to me playing with OpenGL and eventually getting into 3D graphics engines.

I had a girlfriend for a few months and I was hanging out with a bunch of guys from my neighborhood who shared the same interests as me.

I eventually started working with 3D in a big way. I was using 3d studio max, lightwave, maya and about 8 other programs. I was reading tutorials constantly and really getting into it. One of my friends became obsessed with 3D and dropped out of school just to work in 3D Studio Max all the time.

I got a job in the summer of 1999 with CompuSmart selling computers. Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear came out and I was playing that for 8 hours a night for a few weeks. I was still working with OpenGL, making my own 3D game engines and 2D map editors to create 3D worlds. I eventually built a 3D Studio Max-look a like for my Grade 12 final project for my computer sciences class.

On Sept 9th, 1999, the Dreamcast came out, a few months later, I bought one with a ton of games. At the time I was making loads of cash selling computers. I was also spending it as fast as I was making it. I had a huge library of Playstation and computer games as well.

I was hanging out with two guys from British Columbia who's parents had moved to Calgary. There was another guy who was from Calgary originally and a girl from Australia. The 5 of us hung out at school all the time. One of the guys from BC and I became really good friends and we hung out at his place every weekend. His parents had the biggest house I have ever seen, even now, I can't think of anyone with a bigger property. They had huge TVs, tons of PCs, a hot tub, tons of food. We had some crazy times there. Materialism shouldn't being happiness but it can keep teenagers well occupied throughout the weekends. The southern part of Calgary was really developed around that time too and we used to go to the cinemas and malls that were just opening up. The made the rest of Calgary look like some 1980s 3rd world country.

In 2000, when I wasn't hanging out with my mates, I was living at my Mom's house but going to my Dad's place every day. I would transport my desktop between the places which was always a pain in the ass since it was literally everything: desktop, monitor, keyboards, ect..

I had learnt about how macs was really being turned around and how the software was being greatly improved so I got a green iMac. I watched austin powers on DVD on my new mac and I was amazed with the quality of the picture and sound. I really pulled me into the story more than VHS ever did. I did some 3d stuff on my mac too but there wasn't a strong reason to use it before I got a Sony DV camcorder and started editing movies.

My Dad was seeing Tamera, a kiwi he had met online at the time. In June 2000, after an Australian girl that hung out with my group at school encouraged me to, I decided to go to New Zealand. I was 17, graduating from school and I had a good job selling computers. I sold my dreamcast and everything that came with it. I died my hair blonde, I finally got to go to nightclubs, get drunk and I had a girlfriend from South Africa (white and english-speaking) to shag.

By August I was loving adulthood, I was dumped by my girlfriend but I couldn't give a shit. I packed everything, I got my camcorder and I flew from Calgary to Los Angeles and then onto Auckland, New Zealand. I was blown away at LAX when I saw a 747 Jumbo for the first time. It was parked at a window and I couldn't believe how big it was.

I spent a month in NZ but I wish it had been longer. It felt so good to travel outside of North America to somewhere that was different in a lot of sudle ways and had a huge amount of natural beauty to it. I loved listening to people who spoke with a different accent and had very different views on life.

I spent money like mad all the time. When I came back from NZ I was obsessed with the country and the people I met. But I would still spend like mad and I even moved out of my Mom's house for a month at one point. I quit CompuSmart and worked at John Amanson's. Just before the New Year's I got a well paid job at CADVision.

I wished I had saved all that money I had made at CompuSmart over the years, it would have financed a year in New Zealand or somewhere else for sure. I had to get my priorities in order. I had to be conservative with the cash if I was to fulfill my ultimate dream.

I saw some mates who were making good money, but they were living in their parent's basements, spending all their holiday time sat at home on the PC. I saw them and I thought, god, if they only knew there is a huge world out there. There were so many obstacles to enjoying life in Canada. Namely, if you're a computer geek or you know how to compile a linux kernel, women won't want to touch you with a ten foot pole. And the amount of time spent learning about computers is time not spent learning to socialize and becoming charismatic.

Now that I had the job at CADVision, I would start to save every single penny I could so I could emigrate from Canada.

It was now January 2001. CADVision was a horrible place to work. I couldn't stop thinking about traveling and perhaps even going to Australia. I learnt about PHP and MySQL and various ways to host things on web servers.

In March I finally went to Australia and I was never happier. The happiest day I had ever had in Canada was only 5% of the happiness I felt in Australia. This had a huge impact on me. I met heaps of British people and they told me to go to the UK. They said it was great and I'd really enjoy living there.

I went back to Calgary, sold my shitty notebook, my camera and everything else I could find and I got a 2 year working holiday visa for the UK. I remember the day I got it, my passport had stamps, but now it had a full page visa. It was like being given a valuable bank note from another country.

I worked at a wealth management company for the final few weeks before september 15th, the day I was going to move to the UK. I had been given a ticket for $200 by a friend who worked for Air Canada. I had a job interview lined up in Exeter. I started a blog. Sept 11th hit and I got delayed a few weeks. On Sept 26th, 2001 I left Canada and immigrated to the UK.

Everything I enjoyed in Canada was a subculture. I was never apart of the main stream. When I got to the UK, I loved everything. At last, I felt that, culturally speaking, this is where I should be and should have been my whole life. I lived in 2 hostels for 2 months.

The first place was for 3 nights in Bayswater and it was dirty as hell. I remember the Italians in my room sharing a joint on my first night. The UK is insanely dirty and these places are some of the dirtier places but for a moment, I didn't give a shit, I wanted to live my life and do tons of bad stuff that I can't even imagine writing down in this blog ever.

The second place was in Exeter, I spent 2 months there. I had met loads of people, made tons of friends, got it on with tons of women from various european countries, most of which I had no idea where they were. I had managed to get a job doing tech support and it paid above the average in Exeter (which isn't hard since no one seemed to be getting paid anything).

After that I moved into a house with 3 Danish girls and got a £900 PC. I needed 2 credit cards to pay for my computer and I bought just the components so I could save on unnecessary parts.

I was playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein and rogue spear a lot. I was working on OpenGL a bit. I was watching TV from the US and copying things around on iomega zip tapes. I worked 7 minutes from my home so I would often download things there and bring it back to my house. I was drinking and clubbing a lot.

January 2002: I had come back from a Christmas break in Canada to my life I had built up in the UK. I was working on OpenGL more and more.

Dan at my work was trying to make an automatic DSL configuration file maker with PERL. I had run HTTP servers before but I had never was a really done a lot of server side scripts. Most importantly, I had never done a lot with server side scripts talking to a database. Every single web application that is big in this world, uses these concepts together to make themselves tick. Had I been working with say PERL and some sort of database backend on Apache in 1998, I would have probably quit school and started making good money working for some company in Calgary. Alas, I wasted my time on C++ and video orientated code.

I even remember in 1999, when I wanted to sell computers online, I was trying to use microsoft technologies but they were really above my head at the time.

Now, in 2002, things were different. I had some experience making small PHP / MySQL applications at CADVision but it wasn't until I booked a flight online for the first time that the lightbulb in my head turned on. I had booked a flight to Barcelona online with GoFly.com and I was inspired to try to create that site myself. I eventually created a copycat site and in the process, I learnt a lot about php, mysql, apache, html, css, and javascript.

I went to France in March and met a guy there that told me to get into the aerospace business. I tried applying at a few places and I also tried applying for c++ jobs. Everything was in London and work wouldn't give me a workday off unless I had booked it weeks in advance. At the same time, I could see that my coding skills weren't up to par to do this professionally.

In April I went back to Canada to study up on C++, ect... I did a bit of php and mysql as well. I didn't know it at the time but the PHP / MySQL stuff I was studying would be huge for me in a few months time. I had spent the majority of my time working on OpenGL C++ applications. I quickly came up against the realization that my math skills and understanding of algorithms weren't up to scratch for this kind of work. I was still determined to move back to the UK and find more work.

In August, I moved back to London and had a brilliant time. There weren't any C++ jobs for me though. I eventually got a job in Germany working for COMbridge doing PHP and MySQL. I had run out of money and put everything I had into the chance I would get a job coding in Germany. I showed my boss the online flight booking application I wrote and we signed a work contract that day.

I wasn't the world's greatest expert on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but I was determined to learn everything I could. I was very resourceful and I had a large learning capacity for all things IT. Also, at the time, most coders in the world of online applications were just starting out and the best practices for most tasks hadn't really been thought out and shared widely. If it looked ok in IE, that was enough.

I was working from home most days, I would wake up at 10 or 11am, write code, go to my German language school, eat dinner, spend time with Anja and I was generally isolated but quite happy to be out of Canada, coding for a living and exploring all the weird and wonderful things about Germany.

By the winter of 2002-2003 I was downloading a lot of TV shows to watch. In Germany, they do get TV imported from English-speaking countries but it's all dubbed into German so you can't hear any of the English being spoken (MTV is one exception of this). So, being that my German was crap, I ended up downloading a lot of Simpsons, South Park, Chappelle Show and tons of films.

I got into Ages of Empires and I became someone reclusive. Anja and I would hang out together, we would go to English-speaking Ex-pat bars and we would visit her parent's place on the weekends but for the most part, I felt cut off from society more and more. I yearned for a social life like the one I had back in London. I get a high off of hanging out with people and I feel that if I'm spending time with others, then it's time well spent and I've accomplished the most important thing in life: being in the pack. This feeling doesn't match up well with being a computer geek because there usually isn't a big social aspect to being into computers, a lot of the work you do on your own and you really go into your own universe with code sometimes.

By the summer of 2003, my job at COMBridge was in jepordy. They weren't able to sell any copies of the software I had written and my head was about to get chopped off. I had booked a holiday to Australia via Japan so I could finish circling the earth. My boss told me to cancel it and learn German instead. It was a blow, I suddenly had to go to class for 4 hours a day and work another 8 after that. I had lost all my holiday time that I had earned. I felt cheated and angry. I knew I had to leave.

I was trying to research a lot of different aspects of IT at the time. It was hard to see what is big and is something I can get into and what will be up and coming and I could thrive in. I was trying out a lot of different versions of linux, I worked on my blog, I read slashdot, tried firefox and played with .net since there were a lot of job offers for it.

In January 2004, there were suddenly heaps of PHP jobs being advertised in London. I bought an Laptop made in Austria and we moved back to London. Just before moving back to the UK, I was thinking of Australia or Dubai temporarily but that wasn't an option in the end.

I had landed a job at blue barracuda writing code. My knowledge of web application-related technologies blossomed. I turned my blog into a PHP/MySQL Driven site. We didn't have the internet at home so I had to do stuff at work and burn CDs.

From March - May 2004, I was the happiest I was ever in my life. The high slowly disappeared when Anja said she wanted to go back to Germany and what I had was threatened. My right to work in the UK was through a EU family member visa. If Anja had left me, I would have lost my Wife, Job and right to live in the UK. Thankfully, we worked through our problems.

I got into reason and making music again. I was obsessed with Travel. Dubai and Australia were high on the list. I was thinking about India a bit. I admired these British students that would travel the entire world during their gap year. I wish I had that foresight when I was a teenager, I could have had gotten so much travel out of the way sooner and not struggled so much to see the world later on in my adulthood.

In the winter I really got into 3D for a while but finally gave up on it. I finally realised it isn't worth my effort and web applications and online marketing are where the money is for me.

In 2005, I played a lot of ages of empires at started looking into lots of language and political books. Norris introduced me to the idea of Estonia and I met heaps of his mates from there. I enjoyed socializing again since I was a bit of hermit for most of my life. It was cool to have mates that you admired and hung out with all the time again. It had been a while since I had meet people that inspired me to change my life around or follow certain interests since it had worked so well for them. I was making friends that I would really try and keep in contact with if we ever lived in different countries. In Germany, most of the people I became friends with there, disappeared off the radar as soon as I left Germany.

I got into social networking and I thought about starting my own site. I worked on my blog quite a bit, I gave up on music seeing it as I saw 3D, I didn't have the skills to take it anywhere. I didn't have the internet in my house either still. I tried .net again and gave up on it. I tried making a php compiler which would package PHP applications into an exe. I watched heaps of shows off the net since I didn't have Sky TV either. I got a Nintendo gamecube for xmas and played a lot of splinter cell.

In September 2005, I went to Estonia for the first time. It had a dramatic effect on me and became one of my main areas of interest, even still to this day.

In 2006, Anja and I finally got our own place and stopped sharing with flatmates. We finally had the internet and sky tv. The last time I had broadband and a decent number of TV channels in English was in Canada. God it felt fucking good to have them again. Also, I was taking the tube to work, not having to walk or take slow buses full of scuffers. I had a laptop that seemed to do the job at the time.

I was looking into podcasts and vodcasts for work. I was using the PC for more entertainment and reading than technology research. I built dev.marksblogg.com with some new ideas I had about google maps, ajax and design. I bought a new iMac in September. I started thinking about getting a professional camera to take photos, I could feel the limitations of my current camera and I thought it wold be great to document my travels in a more artistic way.

My mac had to emulate Office, Photoshop and Flash which was slow and painful but everything else seems nice. The apple-built applications for doing multimedia and handling photos did an amazing job. Having UNIX built into the system was nice as well.

I still had dreams of starting a company with a few mates. I realized you could start the tech aspect of a company for about £200 and cheap hosting is possible. If you had any capital invested, you could buy a co-located server and be off and running in a very short period of time.

By the start of 2007, my thinking was that multimedia stuff is too time consuming and not profitable enough. Building sites and driving lots of traffic to them is the way. Be the best at making good CMSes, sending emails and hosting commercial websites is the way forward. Let someone else design or play with non-commercial technology. Playing games is also a waste of time. I know I'm crap with design and html so these will be things I will always want someone else to be doing for me.

Again, nothing in the world stays the same for long and I can see some of the things that did me well and made my company a lot of money over the past few years, can quickly die out in a few months time.

The open source technologies like LAMP and Ruby on Rails, essentially the high level stuff, which is quick to learn is the best. Oracle would take too much of my time and I would need to see promise in it and believe I could be doing it for a living in order to invest my time into learning it.

I'm really settling into my mac now. Textmate looks very powerful though I haven't used all of it's top features. I love ultraedit but I'm finally finding it's equivalent on the mac.

I'm learning everything possible about PHP5 and I'm trying to be a better coder. I've been offered great jobs at others companies that pay £37,500+ a year. I'm not getting stuff off of torrents because everyone is streaming commercial videos over flv files on social networking sites now.

I'm really trying to learn the best practice for everything tech-oriented. Code Re-use is important to me as always. I try to see the scope of tasks and not waste to much of my time on any one thing. I haven't learned to be happy with what I have and I always seem to be wanting more. That attitude was what got me here so I won't stop now.

I finally dropped Nintendo like I should've with the N64 and Gamecube. I now have an XBOX 360 and a 32" LCD to play it on. I got a mac laptop with wireless internet in my house. When I'm running, which is about 4 days a wekk, I'm listening to my iPod mini. I'm using a Canon EOS 300D camera to take all my pics. I'm processing them all in iPhoto and I'm pretty satisfied with the kit I'm working with at the moment.

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