The History of Dave
Time to rewrite my lifes history section. I had this written before but it was lost in the last big time server brain fart. Not the servers at fault mind you.
Well lets see, I am a Texan. I was born in Crocket Texas, I grew up out West in a hole in the ground known as Pecos, and I now live in a little pocket outside the city limits of Houston. Except for the year and half I spent in Arizona and what little time I spent in Louisiana as an infant I'm a Texas national. I went north of the Mason Dixon lineonce in my life and that was to change planes.
I spent most of my growing up years grounded and wanting to be somewhere else. I wasn't really to concerned about where, just somewhere else. The desert definately had it's appeal, but not to someone growing up leaning towards the electronics computing end of the spectrum. Not unless that desert happened to be in Silicon Valley. The grounded part was because I made bad grades, if the somewhere else would have been handled I have a feeling the grades part would have followed. A community of rednecks and Mexican gangsters is going to have a school to match its' students, I didn't fall into eaither of those catagories so I was an outsider in my own home town.
So I left my home town less than two weeks after I graduated high school. I spend twelve + years wanting to get out of school and what do I do? Sign up for more and I'm still paying for it. I'm very annoyed for the American way of doing things. Because of what a bunch of dead people did a couple of hundred years ago I didn't qualify for any of the scholarships I otherwise qualified for. They had one nice little line tacked to the bottom of every scholarship I wanted to apply for that basicaly said "White male need not apply". Some call it reverse discrimination, I see nothing reverse about it. Reguardless, I now have an associates degree. The school may not have been the best in the country but it was a nice little setup, five hours a day five days a week, one class that stretched for four weeks, no classes that you don't need. The most important thing that the school provided was unintentional, it finally got me into a real city. My long held theories based on my interactions with people from out of town were correct. I was not as odd as people thought I was, I was the almost normal one in a town full of loons and freaks. I made quite a few friends during my year and half in Phoenix, amoung them none stand out more than JR. He was my roommate for quite some time. Though we didn't always get along the best as roommates I still count him as a brother and call him every three to six months. Ryan is quite memoral as well though I have not been in touch with him for a couple of years. I hope he is still doing well.
This brings me to about the time I moved to Pasadena. I didn't get along to well with one (and thats one out of several) bosses and I was living in a slum. That particular boss decided pay raises, I wasn't getting out of the slum if I stayed there. Besides, out of the people in my group going on Christmas vacation I'm the only who submitted for it properly and the only one who got denied, same guy. So I packed my shit and left. I sorta moved back in with my parent, I basically dumped my belongings at their house, and my dog, then I went to the Houston area to follow on a job lead my great-aunt Dorthy gave me. It worked out. The people at Alphanetworks were great, they trained me on Netware and 100s of other things. I was quite happy with it though I was probably a little to green for their taste. From that company we got together with one of our clients and started a whole new company. I did really well there as far as being a big shot was concerned, at least to the other workers. I initially supervised the call floor in general, then when we seperated out just the techs. I made a lot of friends there and my documentation section thats on this site was a result of work I did there. While I was in Pasadean I kinda got adopted by a kid, he was originally an anoying little 10 year old who followed me everywhere. His grandparent/guardians where suspicious of me at first, I can't blame them but the kid followed me around, I'm not some pshcyo that stalks kids. He couldn't read very well, and since he was hanging around anyways I started to get him hooked on video games that took a lot of reading. I turned off the sound on Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Fathers (oops) and Illusion of Gaia on the SNES. Not only that but since I was constantly playing with hardware and networking during that time he got to watch me gut systems and put them together. He found an old x486 that somebody tossed in the dumpster with Debian on it. Not that I don't like Debian, but this is (now) and eleven year old kid who didn't quite know Windows yet. I gutted it, got together all the extra parts that I had and used some of what he had and got a Pentium 166 with Win95 going. We've since upgraded since then but that's probably the most important thing I've ever done in my life, I've been told that, and I can't help but be proud of myself over that. The letter his grandmother wrote me is now framed on my wall.
The buisness with the new company continued to grow and moving was on the horizon. I had a new roommate, he was only supposed to crash for a few weeks in my one bedroom apartment in Pasadena. We got along well and I was working 16+ hours a day at the time so I was never home any ways. The buisness was suppossed to move to the NorthWest part of the city, it was closer to where the boss lived and there's quite a few technology companies huddled in some of the buildings in the area. So my new roommate and I packed up our shit and moved to the NorthWest side of Houston. The company didn't move there, as a matter of fact it got slightly closer to the old place. But it was a two bedroom and a much nicer place to live. He eventually quit the old company and went to work for the Shell/Texaco/Saudi Aramco Alliance. This Alliance has changed significantly since then. Some time later I did the same. He no longer lives with me. Whats cool is I continued to stay in touch with the kid, and he eventually moved to, he's now quite close to where I now live. This was especially convient to take him to Ren-Fest. I have most recently used him as the bestman in my wedding. More on that later.
This particular part of my website is a work in progress, especially right now. (Octoberish 2003 incase I drop the ball even more)
