As of a day or two ago, I have survived for 28 years of life. Of those, I’ve spent roughly the last decade working in technology. I’m not normally a huge birthday person, so maybe it’s been the recent onslaught of “your parents music” at work, but for some reason it strikes me as a milestone. So, I thought I’d share a few memorable points and people from the last 10 years of being a geek.
The first “real” job
I’d worked some farming, and food industry jobs before, but right after I graduated high school in May of 1998, my friend Joe secured me a job at the school district he was working and graduated from. I think we reported sometime in June to Jim, where we spent the first month or two of the summer lashing cat5 cables together, making ethernet patch cords and crawling through crawlspaces and air-ducts in up-to century old school buildings. Moving into maintaining the hundreds of windows95 clients for the school district, I was tasked with building some kind of mirroring script using “rdist” (for DOS/Win). It was sort of like Norton Ghost, but command-line, rather rudimentary, and free to educators at the time. It did, however, allow us build a lab of 30 computers in something like a day, rather than week once the “master” image for that lab was finished. That was really my first push into Systems Administration. After that I setup an authentication system for the school’s self-hosted ISP, managed Fool-Proof configs (a totally awesome and amusing way to lock down Windows95 machines from student tampering), and started helping Corey with managing email, DNS and the other “core” services that were on the Linux server in the house.
Amazingly, it looks like the Hoopeston School District is still sporting a web design based somewhat off of one I did a decade ago. In some ways I’m not sure I’d ever design anything like it again, but I am proud of it’s longevity. Check it out here, if you dare!
All in all, at eighteen and working with Linux, I really did feel very lucky to be doing what I was doing.
Net66
Around the start of fall semester in ‘99 I needed to look for some work more local to the university; I just wasn’t able to keep the kind of hours I needed to with the high school being an hour away and the cost of school was an increasing burden. My friend Pete and I applied for Support Tech positions at Net66 (now gone), which was then a small ISP owned by Dennis. I got the position and spent a year or so working with Dennis, Marsita, Bobby, Alan, and a whole mess of other folks that rotated in and out, or were a part of Dennis’s other company (Suburban Express)
Dennis, himself, is really what defined my experience at Net66. Much more-so than my hung-over morning shifts on the phones, late night Saganaki and coding sessions with Alan, annoying Marsita by being late to a shift after falling asleep in a class (more often than you think), and even more than George the Cat.
Dennis started Suburban Express while in school, so that he could have an excuse to explain his business school grades falling to.. B’s. It’s a niche bus service that take kids from their central Illinois campus to the Chicago suburbs where they live. And, he’s been terribly successful at running it, and keeping competitors away, including a price battle with GreyHound and various other upstarts.
So, Dennis decides one day to start and ISP because all the other ones in town suck, and he orders a few custom build fancy fancy servers that will run BSDi, thinking he can get them setup in a weekend. It takes Dennis a week to get Apache setup. And, really, that’s one of the things I’ve come to admire most about him; was simply that when he sees an opportunity, he starts working on it for real. Not just thinking, but doing. He’s had some false starts along the way, a newspaper to compete with the monopolized college rag, etc; but his determination keeps him moving forward.
The sale(s)
Dennis sold Net66 to Advancenet in 2000, and I sort of went along with the company. This was after finishing my last two weeks making flyers for Suburban Express, in what used to be O’Malleys (of Don Mclean - American Pie / UIUC midnight drinking song fame). At Advancenet, I was able to meet some folks that would become important to my life, Dave, and very briefly the girl that I would marry, Cindy. Though, neither of us knew that at that time. Unfortunately for her, (or fortunately, depending) she worked near the front of the office which I did my damnedest to avoid, because that’s where the sales folks and those that took messages from customers were. And both groups created more and more work for me. It got to be so bad after a while that I couldn’t get a haircut without being called or paged, and ultimately had to leave school at UIUC for a bit.
I stayed at AdvanceNet for about a year all told, until I bought a car that was a little too expensive for my income at the time. On a lark, I put out some feelers based on hotjobs.com postings from local tech companies. Within days I had an offer at Orbitz.com that I had no idea what to do with. The salary was near double, so I figured I didn’t really have a choice to make and I took it.
While at Orbitz, Advancenet was bought by another company Egix who I did a bit of consulting for to help transition some of the ISP authentication systems that I had been spending a lot of time on. I was pretty naive about it all, and either through my fault or H&R Block’s ended up creating a couple thousand dollar tax bill for myself. OUCH!
