I was born in Paso Robles, California on May 25th, 1968. Like most of the time, I was born right after the Vietnam war was coming to a close. My father was a tank mechanic in the U.S. Army. We lived the suburbia life. A few years later, we moved to Honalulu, HI. My father had been reassigned to Schofield Barracks. I even got to see Bob Hope at a USO show. I can still remember the old-style, reel-to-reel, cameras strewn throughout the sea of army green uniforms. He tried his best to get me closer to the stage. Life was simple as a tolder growing up in a military home. My fondest memories are playing in the piche tree out back. When I wasn’t in the tree I was on the swing set with my sister.
My love for computers grew when I was 14 back in 1982. The Apple II. It was at Boy Scout camp. I was a pack leader and involved in junior varsity sports in middle school. The next year, I got a job at Hardees. I rode my bike 3 miles each way. I was bound and determined to buy myself a computer with a whopping 14.4k phone modem! I got the Commodore 64 and dived into machine code that I read from computer magazines! I bought a tape backup drive and one external 5 1/2” floppy drive! I was teched out! I remember encoding machine code to play christmas carols and playing spider games and such. We didn’t have much by way of gaming back in the day! But, there were a few favorites that I would play for hours!
We played outside when I wasn’t working or on the computer. Every Sunday was dinner at grandma’s! I lived in a very small town. The high school was included middle grades. John Mellencamp was just making the hits. I was growing into my teen adolescence and things were going well! I upgraded to an IBM 386 with 40 Meg harddrive, 14.4k modem and joined FidoNet! Still working for Hardees! I learned psuedo networking with other BBS’s around town and the entire country. We even tied into UUNET for global posting! Games were still pixelated and I couldn’t afford more than a VGA monitor!
After High School, I joined the U.S. Navy! I studied Electronics repair. I went to places I’d of never imagined of setting foot upon! I mean, who would dream they would set foot in Cuba, The US Virgin Islands, Europe and the Carribean. I wasn’t adjusted well to the kind of men that came from larger cities. I feel I had been shielded from the types of morality that came from the city life. I always describe my teens like John Mellencamps, “Small Town”. I would often sit on deck at dusk and peer out onto the water and horizon. I was definitly a salty sailor now
After my enlistment, I signed up for a Radio Electornics Technical School. There I would learn more about troubleshooting and repair advanced electronics boards. But, I found myself still drawn to computing and wanted to learn programming. I had tried C++, Pascal, Basic, Vbasic, PHP. I also signed up for another Tech school to become a certified linux administrator and certified Windows Help Desk. Later on in life, I continued my training through online courses to learn front-end development and CSS3 styling.
Today, I code in liquid for Jekyll CMS. It’s lightening fast. All source is HTML5/CSS3 with possibly jquery library. I’m starting to sell themes that include advanced JSON+LD for structured data. If you give the right data, you’ll see good returns on SERP listings in rich snippets!