Grab A Life

A bit about me. Let’s start at the beginning. When I was very young my parents moved to the country side and bought an acreage. It was fun for a while… Then my parents divorced my mom re-married (a farmer) and I stayed wih my mom. Ok. So. still with me? Im a city boy at heart. Not to mention allergic to everything on the farm. Hay, straw, cows, chickens, horses. Yeah good times. Needless to say I spent most of that time indoors and found my greatest escape at the age of 10.  Computers… My parents had an old computer kicking about I cannot even remember the specs. But it had GWBASIC. and so I learned to program. a lot of LET A = 1 PRINT “Hello how are you”. Most people in my situation made up imaginary friends… I wrote them into BASIC. I got my first real computer when I was about 12 a 100mhz computer 8megs of ram with windows 95. Heaven. I explored everything I could virtually touch. Which led me to my first real escape from the farm. A BBS. Now I’m sure some of you will remember what a BBS was. It was pre internet. This younger local guy started it, it had mods chat … bulletins. Files and even some *gasp* warez. Eventually his BBS grew quite big and he started to offer internet service. Well let me tell you how excited I was… I begged my parents daily to buy me internet, but alas, they were already annoyed with me being on the phone all day and night long, they would pick up the phone to make a call and  get modem squak in their ear.  So they were not too keen on this new internet thing that also used the squak box thingamajig. So me not letting that get in my way I struck a deal with the BBS owner, I would help with his BBS quiz game and he would give me free internets! Huzzah! Now there was still the parents problem of not getting calls. I quickly devised a way to cut the modem off with a switch i salvaged from an old remote control toy, I scotch taped it to the phone cord wires and voila as soon as I heard a call waiting call, Id flick the switch and the phone would ring, parents would get the call and none be the wiser. It only failed when they tried to call out, but id still hear it and just yell ok go ahead!!! from the basement (btw I obtained the knowledge on how phones work by downloading the anarchists cook book from the BBS. The info on creating a linemans handset or bluebox was invaluable.) Once internets were obtain my life changed alot. I began learning everything I could that I thought was cool. This went from games to mods (those used to be mp3s back in the day). But best of all was programming. There were code samples to learn from. I could write my own games in Qbasic! Qbasic I have to say was awesome. and I still keep it around “just in case”. I got into lots of things good and bad, you may remember such things as Netbus and BO. I even wrote my own version… but lets keep that on the down low. Qbasic turned to VB which turned to vb.net so on and so forth. I began working for a small networking company in Calgary at 16.  There, I just fixed computers mostly software related. Drivers etc all those fun win95 issues. I dropped out of high school (yes a girl was involved out of country internet love of course). I ended up completing High school through correspondence.. some how I ended up getting my college diploma before getting my high school diploma… But in the end I got both. I Graduated from NAIT In 2000 and worked for a series of companies thereafter doing desk side support, helpdesk (I once worked for 3web free internet service you may remember them)  and web development. I worked for almost 4 years at a Kitchen Design Company. The company grew quickly, we went from 25 employees to about 200 when I left. There I did everything from programming to network administration. I was THE IT guy.  They sent me to Microsoft training courses to get officially learned in the ways of Microsoft I was taught Windows Network Administration, Exchange Server Administration, and also ASP.NET Web Development. This is where I truly began to explore web programming. I created many database driven applications and always had crazy out of the box ideas like using pda phones to give the service guys instant information on site. (at the time that was not so heard of) My boss once asked me to create a small app to log all of the IT inventory in the building, so I found some blueprints of the building and wrote a vb6 app that actually showed the location of every piece of equipment on the floor. I then moved into writing web enabled apps and began building a logistics application for our warehouse, we got a pda style barcode reader so we could scan pallets in the warehouse and have it use pocket IE over internet to relay the information into a database and spit back a map of where the item was in the warehouse. All very cool things that got me on my way to where I am now. Ultimately I became quite bored and needed some kind of challenge so I quit my job and started my own company. WHAT A DISASTER that was. I took 40k out of my home equity to start my company and it lasted about 7 months. (not to say it wasn’t a GREAT 7 months I juat wish it had lasted longer) In this time I worked mostly on a pet project that never really took off I even hired my friend to help me with it. By the time we were done there was no money left for marketing and I had to go back to work before they took my house. I then sought out a full time job, I began working for a mom and pop shop in Calgary I wont mention the name of the company for legal reasons. I worked there for a year until things got really crazy too much overtime and being treated really poorly even insulted, led to a meltdown and ultimately my resignation.  So. Here we are. I now work with a group of great friends we all run the company (Imperium Inc) creating awesome database driven websites and putting together clean and proper HTML+CSS . We also do managed server hosting and host client servers in a secured data warehouse downtown. I still work on my other projects on the side. I still do normal websites for people now and again under my company Krisco Designs Inc. On the home front, I have 2 girls, one is small white Maltese, and the other large golden doodle. They are getting in the garbage as we speak… In my spare time I enjoy trying (mostly in vain) to learn to play guitar (electric), video games, and of course programming my crazy ideas. One of those ideas is recursive loss-less compression. I have been trying different methods off and on for the past 7 years. I try I give up I try I give up, my best friend has tried numerous times to convince me it is not possible; but I know it is! and if there’s one thing I want to solve before I die it is recursive loss-less compression. It will happen.  Well thanks for taking the time to read this and getting to know a bit about me.