The Beginning 

The story of how Brian the IT guy (as I’m known around the office because, still to this day, no one really knows what I do) is probably not unlike most beginning stories of people who work in most IT departments.  I really liked computers as a kid because I was around them so much (thanks to my Dad, who to this day still prefers his home-built PCs over anything you can buy off the shelf at Best Buy).  My Dad got into computers because they fascinated him.  Mind you, this was just after the days when a computer literally occupied the entire space of a room and could only solve rudimentary algebraic expressions (which is still better than I could do) and took about all day to do so.  Mind you, this was in the 1970s.  A few years passed, and he decided to try building his first computer.  Now it probably went as smoothly as putting lipstick on a pig, but I’m sure he figured it out. Honestly, if you know what components are required in a computer, they practically build themselves; all you need is power, storage, RAM, a CPU (with a fan, preferably for, cooling), and some sort of IO card that allows you to connect peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.  Well, by the time I was born in the early part of the 80s, he had been building custom PCs for a while.
I still remember when we purchased our first CD-ROM for the home computer.  He took me to Circuit City.  Are those even still around?  Anyway, I think he had a coupon from the paper; otherwise, we would have never bought one.  We walked in, and he asked a sales associate, and they brought it out.  The CD-ROM.  It came with a free CD-ROM game.  I don’t remember what it was called, but it was basically a bunch of geometric lines like from the scene in Star Wars Episode V: A New Hope when Luke shoots the two plasma torpedoes down the vent pipes of the Death Star.  Yea-who!  If you can’t tell, I’m a huge Star Wars nerd.  And a regular nerd too.

Before Becoming A Nerd

It wasn’t always that way.  I used to surf—a lot.  When my family moved from Palm Desert to Huntington Beach in 1996, I started surfing every day.  I first learned to surf when I was like 5.  And every summer, I would come down to Huntington Beach with my Grandparents, who owned some apartments.  We’d come down for like two weeks at a time.  So, whenever I was in HB (as it’s known here) I would go surfing or boogie-boarding.  For the record, I say boogie-boarding because it’s like a slur for anyone who actually “body boards”. After all, I don’t really have any respect for them.  Also, people who ski.  It’s like you have a choice whether to be cool or not.  So you choose skiing when snowboarding (and surfing IMHO) are way cooler?  Wow, wait a minute, you might be asking yourself.  Why is this guy concerned about being cool when he clearly is a nerdy IT guy?  To answer your question, as stated before, I wasn’t always this nerdy.  I used to wear really tight jeans, play guitar, and have really long hair.  Seriously, I have pictures.  That was when I aspired to be a musician.

Musical Career

I’ve been playing music since I was 5.  Yeah, the same year I learned to surf.  Except that this past time wasn’t voluntary.  My parents made us kids take piano lessons starting at the age of 5.  They thought it would help us later in life if we had a skill that we could fall back on or something.  Then, we also had to take up a different instrument in middle school.  My sister, who is the eldest, played the trumpet, my brother got a pass somehow because he was already playing Football and didn’t have any more time in his schedule for playing an instrument.  I played the saxophone.  Alto-saxophone to be exact.  Not what Kenny G plays.  If I’d have known who Kenny G was back then, I never would have chosen to play the saxophone.  The problem was that I wanted to play the drums, but my parents weren’t going to let that happen. Somehow, after we had moved from Palm Desert to Huntington Beach, my brother had convinced them to let him play the drums since he wasn’t playing Football.  That’s total bullshit if you ask my sister and me.  We got shafted.  But, seriously, out of all the dorky instruments to play, I made my decision to play the sax.  Honestly, it seemed the least gay.
That turned out to be the worst mistake and bit me in the ass because all my friends insisted that I play the ball sax.  I know, so juvenile.  But I wish I had thought of it.  At this time, dial-up had just become available to us in 1996.  My first experience with the internet back then was entirely different from the experience now.  Back then, you would turn on things in order to connect to the internet.  Nowadays, you’re always connected.

Duke Nukem

I had met this kin in my science class because we both liked playing Duke Nukem 3D.  It was one of the first games that had blood, guts, naked women, etc. And for a boy of 13, I was stoked.  Anyway, this kid in my science class had asked if I wanted to play Duke Nukem 3-D after school.  I said, “Sure.”  At around 8:00 pm, he had called and said, “Let’s play.”  I replied, “Okay.  Are you going to come over to my house, or do you want me to go to your house?”  He laughed and said, “No, let’s play online”.  I was like, “Huh, how the hell are we going to do that?  He said that he’d call back to get started.  Back in those days, you could use your computer’s modem to call other computers like a fax machine; in this case, it was to connect to a PC game over the modem.  I hung up and told my Dad.  He started scratching his head and repeatedly saying, “How the hell?”  Well, I guess he figured it out, and I was playing against this kid from science class.  I was blown away by how cool it was to interact with another player who wasn’t a computer.  And also, I was blown away.  This kid destroyed me.  I remember thinking, “How the hell did he do that?”  He was there, and then he wasn’t, and now I’m dead.
Soon after that, I was in high school.  DSL has just started getting popular.  We still used dial-up because it was free.  Remember my Dad and his coupons.  Anyway, I remember that to get connected, we used a K-Mart Blue Light Special dial-up software.  It had K-Mart ads (that’s why it was free).  Finally, after some persuading, we got DSL.  This was a whole new world, not like that bullcraap in Aladdin.  I mean, I could download any song by any artist on the website Napster.  My life was forever changed.