I, like many of us, read science fiction instead of playing sports.. First computer that was really *mine* was a used Apple II+ in 1982.  Prior to that, I'd gotten to play with an IMSAI 8080 and a Timex Sinclair 1000.  I got to play with a neighbor's CPM based Kaypro 4 around 83-84 quite a bit.  I jumped officially into the world of DOS in 1989 with a 386-16 overclocked to 20MHz and 4MB of RAM.  In around 1991, I gained a mentor at a 3-day Compaq technical certification class on SystemPro and the new Proliant hardware in Netware 3.10+patches.  I quickly became enamored with arcnet, token-ring, and ethernet, as well as the concept of file and print services.  In about 1993, I loaded my first version of Linux.  1.21 kernel slackware, off floppies.  By 1998, I was working full time for a company called Vault.com and I built a scalable load-balanced infrastructure as well as wrote the plan for migration from Cold Fusion/SQL Server/IIS/Windows to Apache/Tomcat/Oracle/Linux. Until about 2001, I resided and worked in Manhattan's Silicon Alley.  After the dot-com bubble bust of 2000/2001, I left computing entirely, sold the NYC apartment and moved to mid-coast Maine, where I built a large house and went commercial fishing for 4 1/2 years.  Moving back to Los Angeles where I grew up, I re-entered the geek world in 2006, working for a LAMP SaaS company, then consulting for an Apache/Tomcat/Linux/Oracle company, and finally landing at my current position with TNCI as a Tier 3 engineer for the Carrier network where I handle network management, systems integration and maintenance, and create a lot of behind the scenes glue for disparate systems to inter-operate with each other. Network management is one of the hats I wear, along with: VoIP MPLS Network Engineering ISP Services Security Policy Change management Resolving issues nobody else can figure out Peter