Veloz

I don't want to say that a person is defined by their pursuits, but hey, what better way to judge someone? I guess first and foremost, I like computers, and I make my living using them.

I started using computers fairly early on. The first computer I had was a weird thing you hooked up to your TV called an Aquarius. I don't think you were really supposed to do anything interesting with it, just make funny patterns on your screen. I never got the hang of that thing, and it wound up in a box somewhere. Incidentally, I don't consider gaming consoles to be computers (I had Atari Pinball, and later an Atari 2600), but they did help to train my eyes to fixate for long periods on the glowing phosphors of a CRT.

From those humble beginnings, I got into Commodore computers. Man, how cool it was to have 64K of memory at your fingertips! And that nifty 1541 5.25" Floppy Drive next to my color monitor clicking and buzzing away... ah, bliss for a budding young computer geek. Unfortunately, I was lured by the dark side of computing, games, and never really got far into BASIC programming after that. Besides, those computers weren't really meant for productivity, were they? Somewhere along the line, I got an SX-64, which was the "transportable" version of the C-64, complete with a 5" tube monitor, keyboard and disk drive in one easy to carry package. Weighing in at a whopping 22 pounds, this thing was certainly no laptop! I'm sure it must have been a funny sight seeing a scrawny pre-teen lugging that thing around.

Then came the Amiga years. Those were some good times. The Amiga really was ahead of it's time in graphics, sound, and GUI. No question. Unfortunately for Commodore, they didn't have the business savvy to market their product well enough to compete with the likes of PCs and Apple computers. But I enjoyed the heck out of my Amiga computers. It was around that time that I got into BBSs and chatting, and was a regular around San Diego bulletin boards and chatrooms. That is where the moniker Veloz was born. Short and simple, meaning "swift" in Latin, it seemed apropos for my alter-ego. I met a lot of great people in those days, some of who still prefer to call me Veloz, and the name has kind of stuck. I eventually upgraded from my first Amiga 500 to a 2500HD with all the trimmings to further pursue my budding film career (HA!). But alas, life takes it's toll, and I had to give it up. I sold it, and was sans-computer for a few years while I got myself stable after high school. Eventually, the lure of computers called again, and I got my first PC.

Ahhh, that first PC. I got into the PC game pretty late, my friends had been into it much longer. My first box had a screaming 486DX2 80MHz processor with a whopping 8 Mb of RAM. I ran DOS 6.22 from my massive 80Mb hard drive and hated it every minute. It was a hell of a change from the beauty and simplicity of the Amiga Workbench. But I persevered, through Windows 3.11, through 95, 98SE, the god-awful ME, and finally 2000 and XP. I think they finally have a decent product, those Microsoft guys. =]

Anyway, my interests don't include computers alone, I also enjoy mountain biking, climbing, music, movies and much much more. I fancy myself a jack-of-all trades, and master of none. I'm not a poet, but I've written poetry, and I'm not a plumber, but I've fixed my pipes too. So these days, I occupy my time writing intranet web pages for a large communications company, programming in ColdFusion, HTML and JavaScript. I DBA for SQL2K servers, and build DBs and apps from the ground up. I also do all of my own graphic design for the webpages, and I am working on a few websites for friends at the moment. I plan to start my own company at some point, to specialize in this sort of stuff, but I really enjoy the steady paycheck my corporate inmate job provides me. To clarify, my cubicle is precisely 8' x 8', probably smaller than the typical jail cell (I dunno for sure, I've never been).