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How I became Inspector Gadget.

There are certain points in your life where you can’t help but look back on the preceding years. Officially I have now left college on study leave, until 20 June, which is my last day ever. So how the hell did I end up at this point.

My first exposure to a computer was a windows 3.1 machine in 1995, it was god awful but I was only five and young kids and technology don’t really get on. It was a good few years before I got a computer of my own, I ended up with a Pentium 1 MX running Windows 95, which didn’t last long. I couldn’t play any games on it, and it was stable as a long pole with a plate on it. So inevetably it was upgraded to a machine running Windows 98 Pentium 2, with a decent graphics card and MPEG decoder card.

 

Its probably at that point that the bug really caught me, from then on in I had a slew of applications and experiments going on the poor computer, which I still have under my desk. Three computers later and I made the big switch to Mac, something which I haven’t regretted, and still manage to keep up with windows excluding Vista which is almost as bad as 3.1. I also managed to pick up Ruby on Rails and a bit of PHP along the way, and ashamed as I am to say it Visual Basic.

People always ask me how I know how computers work. The simple answer is I have been tinkering with them for far too long. Every computer I have owned has been broken replaced upgraded and attacked by me, leading me to come across practically every common error you can get. Its sad to say but I can usually diagnose a hardware fault before the BIOS has finished its self test at boot up, and a software problem by hitting less then 10 commands.

The trend over the last few years is people are using technology every waking moment, but very few know how the stuff works. I love knowing how it works, and couldn’t really care less about using it. I will strip things down take them to bits, rebuild them, and then maybe use them. Because of this I have a collection of gadgets and gizmos that few other people my age can boast. It also means, that college work can sometimes come a distant second to a new gadget or blog post.

I don’t procrastinate as such, I just love technology to distraction. Wait a minute that is technically procrastinating. I don’t know what career I may choose, convergent technologies mean that practically any field is open to me.

Best bit is I know there will never be a boring job, technology is getting more and more exciting the closer we get to the point on the curve we drop off.  

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My New Top Tip – Check Your Processes

Ok so its not that new, but my ageing iMac has been dog slow lately, the solution look in activity monitor to see the uninstalled yet still installed eyeconnect demo is running taking a constant 25% CPU and 500mb Memory.

Zapped it out there and now my iMac is back on top form. I can hold off the Macbook Pro for a couple more months

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One Web Day – Cont

One Web DayContinuing what I said this morning, I am going to write something with a web theme, and try not to be boring.

I could give a history – but that would be boring – What I can say is how the web has changed the way a consume media and also become a creator of sorts.

I wake up in the morning, wake up my iMac, and Google Reader is there to great me; all the news I could ever want tech, entertainment, current affairs, you name it I can have it there. Usually at least 4 different slants on the same topic, there’s nothing like having all the sides of the argument. Then to the mail, for most people this is were it would go wrong, SPAM, but surprisingly I get very little, and what I do get goes to the bin by itself.
eMail, I get a few offer updates from the myriad of tech sites I am a member of, I also get work eMails, and a couple of mailing list filter in. So in two applications I have got my fingertips in a number different information streams, I also can communicate with anybody around the world.

So on to what the internet should grow into; Mainly a trend already started for the web to become more social but not only that, everybody needs access to it. Yes, I mean everybody, developing countries are full of people who could thrive online, creativity is often increased by not having contact with the technology that the invention is based i.e. interweb. Also we need to see an end to SPAM viruses, cons and the general nastiness that the web fosters; its just simply not what it is all about.