Journeys start somewhere

It's no secret that my love for technology has been ever present in my life. I belong to the generation that was born into a world that was beginning to embrace the concept of personal computers, and the possibilities of these now archaic machines was fascinating to me.

As you can see from this picture, I've found a book that really brought back some memories. Turns out grandma has been keeping some old books of mine the whole time. The information is very outdated of course, but it's still kind of cool to browse through it's pages. (Published in 1994)

Interestingly enough, I spent most of my teenage years playing around with Linux distributions, and even worked for an ISP for a short while setting up their dialup modem racks, switchboards and what have you, long before high speed internet was even possible. The "good old days" when armed with a copper line and patience, I got to experiment with dozens of Linux distributions, just because it was fun.

You might guess that I used to dabble in some white hat stuff back in those days, and you would be correct. But of course, I was never a force to be reckoned with, just a kid who was trying to find some side work helping companies set secure servers.

I've pondered quite often why I walked away from making computer science my profession, and to be completely honest I'm not entirely sure. I guess it was a combination of factors, the difficulty of working in an emerging field that people did not seem to be ready for (does that sound familiar?), the difficulty it took explaining the advantages to an aging clientele who was still holding on to fax machines and maybe more importantly so, my immaturity.

I also found an Apollo copy of Redhat linux, well, the envelope where the CD's should be in, and to be honest, I can't remember how I got it. I would normally download everything, so I suspect this was given to me by someone, but my memory is failing me at the moment.

I don't know what happened to most of our books, the ones that used to be on these shelves all those years ago. I asked grandma of course, but she says she has no clue what happened to them either, and I don't want to insist and stress her. Sadly, we used to have all literary classics, Jules Verne, Dumas, etc... a bummer they are missing, but what can I do?

I'm leaving for Florida tonight, at 9 I should be showing my mug at the counters, but I won't land in the swamps until 5 am Sunday, so Sunday It's going to be a fun.

At any rate, I've really enjoyed this trip, I'm feeling optimistic and recharged...

Much love

@meno