Anyone who knows me knows how much I love to work. I thought it might make sense to explain a little of my past, and describe some of my experience and training. I went to a great public high school, where my favorite subjects were math and science. I went to Tufts University, dropped out twice, and finally graduated in December of 1999. During this time, I help several different jobs, from autobody mechanic to graphic designer for two CD-ROMs published by the Pilgrim New Media for Harvard University Press: "Famous American Women" and "Harvard's Guide to Women's Health". While at Tufts, I studied Human Factors Engineering, aka Usability Engineering. I was attracted to this major because of my appreciation of the work Apple Computers had done with their Macintosh line. My friends Jeremy and Al both had Macintoshes (Jer had the Macintosh IIci and Al had the Macintosh Plus) and what I really loved about them was the fact that they were so customizable and visual. While Jer's family mostly used theirs for business, Al used his for games, and drawing. That was cool because we were both into comic books. He liked DC Comics while I was more into Marvel. I had started on computers thanks to my friend Fred, who had the game Bard's Tale. I got my dad to buy that game for me so I could play it on his IBM PC, which had an 8086 processor. I also asked him for a modem, and when he gave me one I was totally surprised. The requirement to the gift was to make it work. Pretty soon, I was able to call up a few bulletin board systems (BBS), including the Razor's Edge BBS, ATDT East, and the Frog's Yurt. I even ran my own BBS for awhile. Though I can't remember what it was called! Totally randomly, there were two cool visitors: Redline and Lady Isabelle who were really quite cool people. As was the style those days, I also had an alias: "becquerel" as well as "oppenheimer". I chose those because I've always been a fan of Albert Einstein's but since we share the first name I wanted something a little different. Thanks to my time on BBSs, I met my friend Mike and eventually got an account with Thirteen, which is very cool. Playing around with BBSs was a lot of fun, but I also liked hanging around with my friends, too. It was because of that fact that I didn't want to become a computer scientist. So when I enrolled in school, I chose Mechanical Engineering as my major, for the lack of a better choice. Whether or not I liked it, I kept getting more and more into computers. Also thanks to Jer's family, I got into Photoshop. I also found a great audio editing program for the Mac, so I decided to make artwork with computers. Next post I'll be explaining my evolution from digital artist, to wanna-be graphic designer, to interface designer, to college graduate, to usability engineer, to interface designer, to network administrator, to software programmer, to database administrator, and... well, you get the idea.