The year is 2002, and I was a high school Freshman. My middle and elementary school experiences were… traumatic, and I was looking forward to having a fresh start. Unfortunately, my high school and middle school were combined (this was a poor town), so a lot of the faces and faculty were the same. I had kicked Principal Badley in the chins and broke his desk phone throwing it at him (he dodged it and it shattered on the wall of his office) back in elementary school, so I was kinda disappointed that he had moved over to be the high school principal. The good things about high school were aplenty, though. I got to choose what I had for lunch (pizza, pretty much every day for the first two years), could come and go on campus as I pleased (which meant I was having 7-11 chili cheese dogs every day for the last two years of high school), and could choose (some of) my own classes.
One of those classes I chose to take was an AP level computer engineering course which used the CompTIA A+ certification curriculum. The course covered everything from old Intel 8080 processors up through the Pentium 3, and was incredibly comprehensive. I learned about RAM speeds, clock speeds, all the different ports, electrostatic discharge safety, CPU mounting, cooling methodologies, etc. I tore apart PCs and put them back together again, over and over to make sure I had the entire process and every component committed to memory. I asked your Oma and Papa for money that Christmas so that I could build my own PC. Oma thought I’d never be able to do it, but she did humor me. She was quite stunned when I had the fastest computer in the house that December.
During this time, I was also busy failing out of my Freshman year Algebra class, because I had better things to do, damnit. I had learned how to count in four different bases by the time I was 10 (binary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal), had been doing hex editing of game resource files, and was an avid web developer by the time I was in middle school. I didn’t have time for such trivial antiquities — there was work to be done, and goddamnit, I was going to do it.
Come January, I was on the long bus ride home after school, and I noticed that a shop was opening at the bottom of the hill near the corner of Bombing Range and Van Giesen. There was a big sign outside with some goofy penguin logo, and a name: “Superwhamadyne Linux Cybercafe.” I knew what cybercafes were (as they were quite popular in the early aughts), but I had no idea what Linux was — and why “Superwhamadyne?” I figured it was probably run by a fairly eccentric person, and even at that point in my life, I enjoyed me a bit of crazy. So, I did what I always do — I waltzed the two miles down the hill on foot in the dead of winter after school, and knocked on the door.
The shop wasn’t even fully constructed on the interior yet, but the owner, Lloyd Gardner, answered and invited me in. I told him that I had been taking this computer engineering course in high school, and spent some time talking about my extensive experience working on PCs. He was quite impressed with my knowledgebase, and we proceeded to chat for three hours. I had asked him what Linux was, and what “Superwhamadyne” was all about, and he kinda changed the course of my life in a strange and serendipitous way.
Linux, as it turns out, is an operating system that was conceived by a man named Linus Torvalds in the early 90s as a free and open source replacement for the old UNIX environments that universities, enterprises, and government agencies had used in the 80s. UNIX was proprietary, and licenses were prohibitively expensive, so Linus decided to build a clone of it and make it completely free to copy, modify, and share. As of the time of this writing, Linux is the most prolific operating system (OS) kernel on the planet. Literally every Android phone runs Linux, and a rapidly increasing number of desktops, laptops, and other devices are using it, too. Windows (Microsoft’s previously dominant OS) is going through a rough patch right now, so a lot of folks are switching to Linux for a more stable environment. But I digress.
To the best of my recollection, “Superwhamadyne” referred to old radios. Prior to transistor radios which were developed during the mid-20th Century, all radios (and electronic devices in general) performed logical operations using vacuum tubes. Tubes were kind of like light bulbs, but operated in such a way that they could represent two separate states and change that state depending on the inputs it got. When you strung enough of these together, they could perform any classical computation, albeit slowly. Transistors do the same thing, but use semiconducting materials in order to process their state changes. Effectively, that meant they could be much, much smaller, and result in much faster computations. A modern silicon chip contains trillions upon trillions of these transistors in a space the size of your thumbnail. But as this technological shift was coming about, there were a bunch of radios which were colloquially called various permutations of “whamadyne,” based on how powerful they were computationally. So “Superwhamadyne,” was a superlative, describing something that had a lot of processing power.
After explaining these things to me, he asked if I’d like to come learn the ropes as his apprentice. I gleefully accepted, and at age 14, I had my first job. I continued to work pretty much nonstop, occasionally juggling two or three jobs at a time while in school, until I was 37. Lloyd taught me a lot of things — soldering and recapping motherboards, safely discharging CRTs (don’t do that), Linux system administration fundamentals, UNIX filesystems, good backup and recovery practices, cable management, and much more. These skills built a strong foundation upon which I was able to earn money throughout half my adult life.
Eventually, I had become skilled enough that Lloyd suggested I go out and find my own clients, and offered to let me use his workspace in exchange for a small kickback. I was enthused about this opportunity, and started advertising by putting flyers around town, ordering business cards to hand out, and using word-of-mouth to get my name out there. Before I knew it, I had a small book of clients and was able to make some serious money. I was the only high schooler earning $20/hr and working on their own schedule, and this was in the early 2000s when $20 was a lot of money. I spent most of that on Magic: The Gathering cards and junk food, but I was young, and still had thirst for life.
When I was 17, my biological father (with whom I have been estranged for some time, as will be explained in another chapter) drove out to the Tri-Cities to sign off on me getting a learner’s permit. Your Oma has always been neurotic, and was too afraid to let me get one like everyone else did when they turned 16. It was an awkward experience taking driver’s education with people a year younger than me, but one advantage was that I had become quite the savvy businessperson. The owner of the drivers education company needed his office PCs upgraded, and I managed to pay for class with an in-kind services exchange (he still paid for parts, but the labor component was cashless). You can find a lot of these opportunities if you learn a trade and don’t mind being a shameless self-promoter.
When I graduated high school, I briefly worked three jobs. I kept doing my IT work, but also worked part time at the grocery store near Oma and Papa’s house (which your Oma insisted I do as a summer gig), and worked a third job as a traveling cutlery salesperson. The cutlery gig was a lot of fun, as I got to use the business skills that I had learned under Lloyd, and got to hone the sales and marketing skills I’d use throughout my life. It was also the most profitable of the three, typically yielding me around $800-$1000 a week, and sometimes even more. The company wanted me to forgo college and manage my own branch office, and even took me to a new manager introduction meeting on the West Side of the state to be introduced to the higher-ups at the company. I was set on college though, as I wanted to be classically trained (more on that in another chapter).
I left home in August of 2006, moving to Ellensburg, and began university there. It was the most magical time of my life, and taught me all the things that weren’t technical or business related which make me a whole person. I maintained my IT firm all the way through law school, while also working various other jobs (Japanese cultural exchange liaison, distance education video technician, Arby’s team member, policy analyst, public defender extern, professional porn critic, and others). I abandoned the IT gig in 2014 when I opened my own law practice, and wouldn’t return to computer engineering until 2022, following a suicide attempt.