Hello World! (Yet, again)

After having so many blogs and personal websites in my life, here is yet another one.

The reason? Well, new career path and the need to showcase my interests and what I do with my ethical hacking skills. I guess despite the normalization of social media in our everyday personal and professional lives, the rockets to mars, electric cars all over California, intelligent apps, etc. — the old-fashion personal blog is never going to go away. Well, let’s take it from the top…

I believe it was in 1994 that I started toying with computers. I had taken computer repair classes in high school for my junior and senior year and the coolest operating systems at the time were Windows NT 3.0 and Unix Solaris.

All my life I had gravitated towards computers. When I was 8 years old, my uncle owned a Commodore 64 and I cherished the times I would type on its keyboard though my uncle kept it turned off for fear that I may break it.

When I was in junior high school, one my favorite classes was typing because we got to use computers to learn from the typing programs. I remember well the one where letters would drop from the top of the screen and you had to type each of the letters before they hit the “ground” (bottom of the screen). It was fun.

No other program surpased my love for “Cave of The Word Wizard” in spelling class. It was a Commodore 64 game in the computer lab. It had a cool story line: The mission was to get clues from the wizard so you could guess the mystery word. When you won, you were rewarded with diamonds (or rubies)! I loved it.

I always wanted my own home computer, even a typewriter would have been awesome, but my mother couldn’t afford one during my school years. I had to go to the computer labs at school or the library to play around with them or use “Word Perfect” to write my short stories. I loved writing — had quite an imagination as a child.

Right after high school I got my first job bussing tables at the new California Pizza Kitchen downtown. It was a hard job, but the tips were good. A few months later, I was trained as a server and quickly moved to work as a bartender. The tips were even better behind the bar! I worked mostly nights so that during the day I could continue an internship at a military research institute where I helped out in the dark room processing photos of scientific samples, mostly of bacteria or other pathogens.

Up next! In the next blog post: IRC and ICQ adventures. Plus, how I managed to build my first PC.