Who the hell is Adam?

I guess if I want people to read what I have to write, I should probably let them know who they hell I am.

Long ago, in the time of the good old 286 under the guidance of Trevor (dad) and Jackie (mum), I caught the bug. The blissful days with QBasic powered Nibbles and monochrome monitors begun my passionate relationship with computers. This quickly led to an obsession and the rest is history.

Growing up in a rural town in Victoria, Australia, my exposure to hardware, software and tech based services was always somewhat limited but I persevered and nearing the end of high school made the decision to pursue a career in IT. During the later years of high school I discovered my talent for coding and coupled with an appetite for the Internet chose to undertake a degree in IT majoring in Internet Publishing.

Although the degree I had chosen was somewhat broad, it did provide me with wide exposure to various online and offline technologies, while also providing me with a solid grounding in the key ideas of 'the web'. Following the fairly successful completion of this course, I found myself with tough decision; enter the workforce or continue my studies. After continual rejection on the job front, I made the fateful choice to give university another year, and in 2004 joined the Charles Sturt University honours program, under the supervision of Dr. John Atkinson and Dr. Rosemary Black.

It was at this point that my long romance with the Internet took a brief hiatus. As it turned out, a year long honours program is hard work. Who would have guessed huh? Not helping was that I had decided that a qualitative study would pose more of a challenge then just testing a bunch of statistics against some formulas, and thus spent the majority of my year conducting, transcribing and analysing face-to-face interviews. A challenge indeed.

So I constructed my literature review, gathered my data and typed out my dissertation. At this point I would like to throw out a major thank-you to both John and Rosy for wading through and making sense of the 200+ pages I originally presented them with. In the end I came away with another star on my transcript, a massive sense of achievement, a long list of people to thank for their patience, a new catch phrase (Be Succinct!!) and a published article (Thanks again John and Rosy).

I could put it off no longer; it was time to join the rest of the 9-5 zombies. Luckily I had the support of not only my family and friends, but a very special person simply named B. We took the leap together and left everything behind for the big smokes of Melbourne. After an extended affiliation with unemployment, I was picked for an IT support position with a large engineering firm. A year on and I'm still learning a lot from this role and looking towards the future. If there is one thing that this job has given me though, it is the funding (as little as that is) and time to return to my passion for computers, and more importantly the Internet.

And that brings us to 2006. B and I now own a house we live in together (yes I know it's getting serious), and things in my life have settled down a bit. I've become complacent and so it's time I tried something new. As mentioned in my introductory post, I have never really been one for online participation. I didn't want to leave traces of my past for the government to use against me, blah, blah, blah. But recently I have realised just how stupid this sounds coming from an 'IT Professional'. Time to drop the bull-shit and get involved.

I have a stack of ideas running around in my head of where this project is heading but I will save them for another post. In the meantime I will simply say that I will continue to move forward with this quest and bring myself more inline with the Web 2.0 culture.

Categories: Introduction, Adam, Personal, Smoiled