MATC and Me: The journey begins...

Technology and Me

It's been almost 20 years since I graduated from high school, and I've decided to give higher education yet another try. I previously (and briefly) attended UW-Milwaukee as well as MSoE. I'm currently enrolled in the IT Programming curriculum at MATC. Why did I decide to return to school this time? That's a good question. And like most good questions, there is no short answer; more of an explanation, or story, if you will. My story begins about 30 years ago. Around the age of 6 or so, I learned how to write and debug programs on my father's Commodore 64. Over the next 12 years, I learned half a dozen programming languages, and became quite the self-taught expert on the new operating systems from a company called Microsoft.

When I graduated from high school in 1995, I was accepted into the computer engineering program at Michigan Tech (a fairly prestigious institution for computer geeks like myself). Unfortunately, I was unable to attend due to my family's financial situation. Disheartened, I decided to move down to the big city and make my way through life as best I could.  

Having nothing but a high school diploma, and desperately needing a job, I applied to be a telemarketer. In the area of the application where it asks you if you have any special skills or training, I simply put "I am good with computers." When the hiring manager read that line, she told me to sit tight while she ran and got the head of the data processing department. I was hired that day, and thus began my IT career. Because I had been working with computers for so long at that point in time, it didn't matter to companies that I didn't have a college degree.

Over the next 5 years I held a number of IT positions including database management, networking and PC technician and even systems administrator, all without any formal education.

Then, in 2001, the so-called 'tech bubble' burst and created a glut of unemployed IT professionals. Competition for open tech jobs was insane. Hundreds of people with Bachelor's degrees, even Master's degrees, in computer science were all vying for help-desk positions. Those of us with experience but no degree didn't stand a chance. To compound matters, I was getting burned out in the IT field, and so I decided to leave the computer world behind and start working with my hands. No more reinstalling TCP-IP stacks or dealing with email viruses. I wanted to make things, tangible things. And so I did, for the next 12 years. Which brings us to today.

I finally realized that I'd never be happy with my quality of life if I didn't pursue a professional career. I've always been enthralled with programming, so I figured, why not? I'm good at it and I enjoy it. All I'm missing is the formal education. MATC offers a cost-effective online learning environment that fits in with my life, so here I am.

My true passion and ultimate IT-field of choice is embedded computing. As far as I'm concerned, the smaller the form factor, the better. I find the challenges of working with RTOS's exciting and promising. SoC's that boot linux in 0.5 seconds, real-time data encryption with extremely high throughput rates, even cell phones are considered embedded computers. 

That's my story (as far as technology is concerned). I may decide to author other blogs about my personal life, my interests, my cats, etc, but this blog will serve as my soapbox for all things tech related, hence the name 'Broad Spectrum Analysis'.

This post will not be representative of future posts. So if I seem too verbose, or you just aren't interested in my personal history, please check back again at a later date. You'll be exposed to opinions, reviews, commentaries, and probably a healthy dose of humor.

And remember kids, it's not a good idea to run ' rmdir -rf ' as root unless you're SURE ;)