Brad Dunn
This, for arguments sake is me and I work on the web.
My father is a wise man. He told me many things. Some still resonate with me to this day. None more prevalent that his advice about the average work day. A schooled master of hard work.
"Brad...don’t be like me" he would say with an err of distinction.
"The trick is, work smarter, not harder".
I figured the most relevant course of action was to turn around 9 hours of competitive computer games into some kind of career path.
When I was around 15 I was still too young to work on the web. I spent time there though. I socialized there, I hung out there, I met friends and I experienced wonderful new things all within its walls. No work yet though, to young.
Like all internet socialites, instead of going to work, I decided playing games was much more interesting, anything violent really, just to keep the religious groups interested in current events.
At this point I must stress, I am not part of any VMS, BBS society. I am not a legacy IT professional who insists on chewing your ear off about technologies that are now in museums.
“I remember the days when I worked on VMS / stone henge.” they still say. Their heads tilted skywards trying to educate the Ipod wearing IT professionals of today.
I was raised in the .com boom era. When people would wear low ICQ numbers with pride. Like elitist dance music enthusiasts nodding their heads at the front of the crowd.
“ICQ was better in 96” they would say.
I grew up when people still argued about how to pronounce ‘Linux’. Where people were getting arrested for making overseas phone calls for free. When Red boxing was cool.
I grew up in script kidding nirvana. A place with NetBUS. People lost sleep over that. Where exploits worked. You downloaded them. Bugtraq provided them. Where Napster was cool. Nimda, Code Red, it was all there. Where everything you read about electronics was written in notepad. I miss those times.
Most people think video games are a waste of time. I can honestly say the reason
I can type 120 words a minute has something to do with my desire to shoot grunts and submit verbal harassment at the same time.
Listen up parents, here’s the bad news. What you don’t want to hear. The ‘your kids are on ecstasy’ moment. A current Affair will not teach you this. Games will give your kids skills. Serious. No Doubt. They will turn your private school, blazer wearing delinquent, into a my-space dancing, face book prancing, e-commerce Zionist. A Technical powerhouse by the time he’s old enough to fix your stupid Itunes.
If I can give one bit of educational advice to all those nail bighting, soon to be parents out there do not let the Television educate your children. You-tube will do it for you.
Around the turn of the millennium, the one where the lights were going to shut off, I cut my teeth in various avant-garde IT institutions, none more educational than Pretzel Logic. A heavyweight in its time, but like all .com juggernauts, the intellect and genius under the covers littered themselves across the globe in a classic western Australian exodus. Memories in tact, always lending their homes to migrant ex pretzel travelers.
I learnt many things at my time there. The finer art of destroying Warwick’s computer. How to remove him from administrator groups with humorous praise. How to successfully manage a network of 50 servers with a budget of 'do your best'. I learnt how to hi-jack Google sites using Squid proxies, and all those other fun Linux tricks I learnt from Dan. Salad days.
My name is Brad Dunn and I still work on the web.