I work on the web.

This is me before I quit smoking, and I work on the web.

I am the product of a luddite truck driver and a catholic bookkeeper.

After failing my HSC miserably (17.1) and having no idea what to do with my life - and thinking that possibly it was over before it began - I decided to take a short course in desktop publishing at the Computer Graphics College as it was probably the closest thing I was going to get to tertiary education.

I'd never been particularly artistic or creative at school, in fact I never excelled at anything - except being average - so design and technology was never really a "calling" for me. I think I just liked the look of the ads they ran in the Sunday Tele, it had an eye on it or something.

After 6 months of Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark training I was ready to join the working weak. Problem was no one would give me a job, so I spent the next 9 months on the dole air drumming along to death metal to pass the time and eating 2 minute noodles every day for lunch. Screw detox, atkins or Jenny Craig - unemployment is the the ultimate weight loss program.

My great aunty Iris loaned me what little money she had to get my education, as well as purchase one of the college's Macintosh 7200's (they were upgrading to the 9500s) so I could continue learning.

After weeks of pestering my parents soon after bought me a modem and an account with an ISP and I was well on the way to having a pornography addiction new career.

After setting up an account with Geocities I decided to buy a book on HTML and see if I could make some money from this internet thing, seeing as it was costing my parents $5 an hour - thanks Ozemail!

My first "home page" consisted of shiny 3D balls rendered in Strata 3D, and content and imagery ripped off from another site - copywhat?!

This site helped me land my first job at what was then called Nouveau Monde, most of my time was spent making updates to the One.Tel site out of a pokey bedsit in Tamarama that smelled like wet.

Unfortunately I lived in the middle of Woop Woop, so 9 months of travelling 2 hours each way soon got the better of me and I quit. Soon after I landed a job, with the help of a friend of my mother's, at a desktop publishing place in West Ryde called The Pagesmith. At that stage it was a 1 man show run out of the front room of his house. We ate chinese on Mondays, and I always had a dog sitting at my feet.

Soon after starting at The Pagesmith I moved out of home in to a cockroach infested house hell hole in Redfern. There my new flatmate and I decided, possibly when under the influence of god knows what, to start a business building websites. He had the people skills, and I had the talent. It just kinda made sense. To save money we used a business name that he had previously registered, but never intended to use, and Dark Horizon was born.

At one point I was working 3 jobs at once - The Pagesmith during the day, The Weekly Times at night (putting ads together for the next days print run), and Dark Horizon.

My other housemate at the time was a systems admin, he and another friend graciously helped me out with learning Perl (CGI) as it was the biggest thing to hit the intertube at that time, but design was my first love and I was never really distracted from it. I let my flatmate have the Perl book after I saw him disappear into the bathroom for 20 minutes with it tucked under his arm.

Gradually I moved in to ASP coding as it was a requirement for a job we picked up (my co-director had a habit of being a bit loose with the truth when it came to our skillset).

In early 1999 we had started looking at securing venture capital - all the kids were doing it at the time - for some products I had built using ASP, specifically Flash and Video based email delivery, and a Flash based presentation tool (built using Flash Generator - dropped $15k on a piece of software that barely lasted 1 version). For some reason people actually gave us $500,000 to go and complete these products.

12 months and 20 odd employees we went tits up and everyone got fired, and I went back to being unemployed for 3 or 4 months where I spent my days eating cheese jaffles, going for bushwalks, and dodging real estate agents who were chasing overdue rent.

After that I worked for Deepend - which was by far and away the best job I have ever had, an amazing bunch of people who started me down the road to a fully blown drinking problem - then Hyro where I started to learn .NET (once again our skillset was embellished, probably by me this time as I was Technical Director of the company), and worked on a lot of cool games. It was there I was afforded the opportunity to move to Melbourne, which I had always wanted to do. Several months and several cunting moves later I was fired for...well, doing my job - one day before my 3 month trial with Melbourne Hyro was up.

After doing some circle work in the company car park to emphasise my disappointment, I set about re-establishing contacts in Sydney to help my newly established freelance career. I highly recommend it, you can go and see friends any time, hang out and have coffee or tequila, work 4 hours a day and charge through the nose.

I now work at Lemonade and I've been doing .NET for about 4 years now, as well as XHTML and CSS, and enjoy it quite a lot. I wouldn't say I'm passionate about the web, or programming, the thing that really gets me excited is learning. Learning a new language, or a new technique, or even creating something cool by accident is what keeps me going.

Processing is my latest interest, and I've done some cool stuff such as this video wall and an audio reactive typographic piece which we're going to launch on the Lemonade site in the next few weeks. I'm also getting in to electronics. I've built an LCD clock that not only tells me the time, but also the temperature outside as well as how many emails I have, and am currently building my own infrared receive to control my PC as well as a USB breathalyser. I am also a founding member of Australian INFront and spend whatever time I have left over working on the new version which is going to be pretty cool if we ever pull our finger out.

I still don't excel at anything, but I guess I'm average at a few more things than I was 10 years ago.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biomechanic/1549007747/