started hacking on a commodore 64 when i was 10<br><br>

loading in basic programs that were in the back of magazines... peeks/pokes and ,8,1 anyone?<br><br>

also remember fondly the day i clipped a hole in a floppy and doubled the capacity<br><br>

then moved on to an XT clone that was supposed to be an accounting machine for my parent's business<br><br>

seemed like a step backward from the commodore... orange monochrome screen, lame pc speaker, no games<br><br>

found out it wouldn't read a high-density floppy (1.4MB at the time) so replaced the cpu with an nec v20 that would<br><br>

added a modem and found the world of BBS... now it seemed like the XT was actually useful for something other than simple dos games<br><br>

BBS doors games were awesome... playing online (pre-internet) with other folks was relatively new and no one else i knew was doing it<br><br>

rushing home to play my tradewars turns before they expired was an imperative!<br><br>

from my local BBS connection, i would branch out to any system i could contact via phone line... sometimes you'd find a nice sysop who would provide a non-toll gateway<br><br>

then i was introduced to the internet via a windows 3.11 trumpet winsock connection and the ncsa mosiac browser<br><br>

can still remember watching the first picture load in a webpage... took forever and rendered line by line<br><br>

taught myself HTML from a book and have been hacking on the web ever since<br><br>

i have been fortunate in my IT career to have worked with a number of awesome people<br><br>

i'd like to acknowledge them in rough chronological order:<br><br>

-  Bill Norton - the father of a rugby buddy... was my first 'real' web design contract... also kept me in beer money doing show setup and teardowns<br><br>

-  George Matthews - ex father-in-law... george gave me my first real gig as a computer service tech... until then i had been working building webpages for folks and fixing computers for anyone who asked<br><br>

-  Mark Boyle -  he gave me my first job with MTT at their NBO office... this was pre-merger (Aliant) and was an amazing place to work<br><br>

-  Everage  -  this was a company where Andrew Wilcox, Cliff Gibb, Josh Huff and myself worked for an Ontario contracting outfit... great guys and interesting contract-based work<br><br>

-  Sportsdatabases - another great group of folks... Mark, Peter, Kevin, Barry, Johnny, Scott, Jeff... was like hanging out with friends every day<br><br>

-  Jon Blanchard  -  easily the most eccentric guy i know... brought me to my current gig... we've drifted since he left and i miss our chats<br><br>