About Me

CiRcUiT And The Electronic Gate

First off, I am flattered that you want to know more about me and I have humbly tried to tell some of my story.

I currently live in South-western Ontario, Canada, near the small town of Forest. I grew up in near-by Sarnia but moved out here to live out in the country around 4 years ago. I am currently employed by Birnam Excavating driving a dump truck. Some people ask me why, since I know so much about computers, I drive a truck instead of being in an office. The answer is simple. I like being outside and do not want a job were I am trapped behind a desk. The opportunity has never presented itself since my college days. Besides, I like driving and operating heavy equipment!

My computer experience goes back to the late 1970's were I took the course "Computers for Young People" at the local college in Sarnia. From here I took part two of this course and by then I was in high-school. In grade 9 I started taking Computer Science courses that started at the grade 10 level. When I was in Grade 10 I was approached by my previous teacher of "Computers for Young People" to teach this course at the college. I did this for one semester. I liked it but I think, being a teenager, trying to handle 10-12 year olds was a difficult thing and I was incredibly nervous. Public speaking was not something I liked doing at all either so that didn't help.

First I learned VMS-BASIC on the VAX-VMS 750 they had at Lambton College. After school I used to bike to the college to use the colleges computers. I was hooked. Once in high school, they had TRS-80 Model 1's, so I continued with BASIC and touched on Assembly. When I was in Grade 10 my high school received new computers called the ICON (The University of Western Ontario had a hand in designing this semi-networked computer system) that ran a version of UNIX and now I taught myself C. Being kids we, of course, fooled around with the security of this system and exploited holes in it. This is when I started working on viruses and such but soon found that, although fun to see if you could make it work, I didn't want to be malicious and destroy other peoples things.

After high school I moved on to Lambton College in Electronics Engineering Technology since I wanted to program and repair computers. This really wasn't the right course for what I wanted to do but they didn't have a single course that would cover exactly what I wanted.
There was a brief interlude (that I won't go into here) between my first year at college and the next time I went back. When I did go back, I went into Computer Programmer Analyst. For the first year I received a 4.0 and ended up only going to tests for half of my courses. This is where I obtained my handle of "CiRcUiT". I used this as my user name on the VAX VMS-750 (and later the 780). Due to financial difficulties I could never go back to finish. I never lost the computer bug though.

I bought an IBM XT clone for $3000. I upgraded this from 8MHz to a 10MHz motherboard w/640KBs of memory. (I still have this motherboard!) Then the Intel Pentium came out and I bought a P60, upgraded to a P133, then sold the P60. I then bought the parts for my first AMD system and built an AMD K6-3 400MHz with 128MBs of RAM. (I still have this motherboard and CPU also) Next was an AMD Athlon 900MHz and an ASUS K7V motherboard. I upgraded the CPU to a Duron 1300 and this is still running in my home as my teamspeak, file and web testing server.

My current main system is an AMD Athlon 2500+ running as a 3200+ with 1GB of DDR400 RAM.

Over the years I have repaired and built many systems for friends, co-workers and family. Everything I have learned is from reading, doing and experimenting.

HTML And The Way Of The World Wide Web

Also, I have been doing web site design since 1998 and PHP, Javascript, and MySQL since 2003. My first site was dedicated to the Dodge Raider SUV of which I own one. In 2003 I decided to register my own domain (this one) and from there started to play with HTML in my spare time.

Since then I have learned a great deal. Following the newsgroups and reading articles from many sites on the internet which has been a great resource for me. Recently I taught myself server side scripting using PHP and some MySQL. The most recent thing I have learned is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Well, I should say learning since you can never learn the entirety of a subject.

The Circuit Breaker

This is the handle (nickname) I was given by fellow students when I was in college. I used to experiment with what the terminals could do. This used to facinate the average person there that had no idea on how to use the computer terminals normally, let alone do graphics and such. Along came the good old ANSI commands for the VT-100 terminals and you could draw pictures. Since I knew more about how the systems worked people used to think that I was hacking and cracking the system. In fact I had more than one meeting with the head of computer science at the college just because of rumours. I never did anything to alter or destroy the files on the system. I did get through the security and look at the files though. I was named Circuit Breaker from some of the people I hung around with while there and it just kind of stuck. In online gameing I shortened it to CiRcUiT and that is where it is right now.

Although there is no way to stop people from using my nick, I have notice that when I sign up for some things, the name is taken. It makes for some weird name inventions. I've used circuitv1, circuitcan, circuitofcan, circuitjc etc...

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