About TecBrat
TecBrat was given his name by his wife. He had
been a Win9x support tech for a while, but was an all around geek at heart. This
explains the "Tec" part of the name. Oddly enough, It would have been "Tech"
except that at the time, 1998, he was trying out a free subscription to AOL
(Sucks!) and any screen-name with "Tech" in it was reserved to for AOL (Sucks!)
support. All that said, Tec likes his name the way it came out. As for the
"Brat" part of the name, he got that from brat like behavior with his
girlfriend, (who became his wife).
Dang! All this writing about myself in the third
person is driving me CRAZY! Let me switch gears.
I have said, My online name is a Gift from my
wife (WOW! How I love her!) that I keep with great fondness. The brat part is
easy to live up to, but the tec part requires a bit of effort. This site, and my
recent job change (went from "escalated customer service" to web developing)
will help me in that area.
When I said I was an all around geek at heart, I
mean I was good at science class, sucked at sports, wore glasses, and owned a
commodore 64 when they were fairly new. I took BASIC programming and
PASCAL programming in high school and taught myself QBASIC on Windows for
Workgroups. (what was that, 3.4 or 3.24, something like that?) I got my tech
support job having never owned a PC, but took to it like a fish to water. Win 95
was just getting a good running start. I learned so much in the next 4 years
it's amazing. I really considered myself a "Power user" I'd hang out on Yahoo!
chat and found that my skill topped out about the same place as the best techs
in there. If I knew the answer, 2 or 3 others probably did too. If I didn't know
the answer, it wasn't likely that anyone else did either. (Not saying I was the
brightest tech around, just among the brightest that chose to hang out in Y!
chat. My company stopped offering tech support to its customer about that time,
(as XP came out) so I am still a bit of a (L)user. when it comes to XP. (Getting
better, plus learning a little Linux because of the webservers I use on my new
job.)
A search for TecBrat on Google will likely bring
up some alt.lang.basic posts, and maybe even some posts on a alt.lang.bat or
alt.prog.bat or whatever it was. I played Quake and kept "Tec" in front of my
clan tag, but I will refrain from typing it here because it is considered
profanity by some. "Tec[.....]" (fill in the blank if you recognize me)
In my new job mentioned above, I am learning to
program in PHP and use the occasional MySQL database. It is my goal to become
proficient at both so that I can easily write my on applications as well as mod
other open source projects. I enjoy sharing my code if it is good enough to be
of use to anyone else. I don't know if I will ever do freelance work
because my boss (aka my best friend since high school, how lucky can a guy get!)
can't spare me enough to devote any time to it.
That's enough about TecBrat. Probably more than
you ever wanted to know.
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