Favorite Thing to This Day

In school my favorite subject was “Computers.” At the time, I didn’t quite know what that meant, nor did I really care. Kids thought I was nerdy because computers weren’t cool. The popular kids didn’t care about computers, they were athletes. That’s how they made friends. That didn’t deter me from keeping up with what I enjoyed the most.

I started with HTML in the 6th grade, and it escalated from there to include design and photography. Today, I work in IT at a rather large software company you might have heard of, and I enjoy it. If I had to change career paths at this very moment, the only shift I would make would be to photography, something that was stimulated by computers, too.

I experienced my first Mac around the 6th grade timeframe, too, but it was one of those colorful eMacs with the round one-button mice. I remember the next year my school bought newer white iMacs, still of the tube-television style one-piece setups, but the mice weren’t completely round anymore—though they still had one button.

Jump forward a couple years later into high school, and that’s when I got to feel my first, what I felt like was a legit iMac. It was a behemoth at 27” in screen size and I was blown away by it. The resolution—all those pixels—and the ability to have so much on screen and be able to do it all at once!

That was my last real contact with a mac until I bought my own in 2011. Don’t get me wrong, I used Windows computers, too. I built my own gaming-purposed desktop in the beginning of 2011 and rocked it like no other. However, it didn’t stick with me like my 15” Macbook Pro did. That same Macbook Pro is sitting in front of me right now. It’ll be four years old in roughly eight months and while I sank a lot of money into that gaming desktop I built, I can’t say it would be running the same this many years later, without intervention.

In IT, I’ve supported Macs, PCs, Windows servers, Linux servers, and any blend of those four technologies. If It hadn’t been for my interest in computers from the very beginning (with a Packard bell 486DX2-66), I don’t think any of my interests I have today would have flourished in any way.