Michael Kordahi asked people to write up what their geek origins were http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=1292. I had some fun digging around and finding old links from the past. So here is a brief rundown of my early years.
Early years:
My geek origin story definitely starts at school. My school was very forward thinking and every student was given an apple laptop, with a 4 grey scale screen! During school hours I’d be making Hypercard animations and games. I also got started with writing Quake 2 and halflife mods for fun and eventually moving on to homebrew on the SEGA Dreamcast. In my later school years I would experiment more and more with the school’s computers and networks. Every time they put up new restrictions, or installed new software like “Mac Admin”, it would only take me a few days before I was able to circumvent them. I was sent to the high school office on more than one occasion for this, and nearly expelled twice. This is also the origin of my gamer tag: xp3ll3d.
Those early years of “Burela vs. the admins” is probably what made me very vocal about computer freedoms such as internet filters (and also why I don’t get along with corporate IT in organisations very well).
University years:
I’ve always been a geek at heart, and the need to spread the knowledge has always been with me. University was a brilliant place to be who you want to be. This was definitely the origin of my love for participating in the developer community as I ended up running a lot of community events for geeks during these years.
It started off with me being nominated to be president of the University’s “school of computing society”, I found I had a knack for organising people and events and it all snowballed from there.
During one university year I:
This resulted in me becoming a Tasmanian finalist for “Young Australian of the Year” http://www.australianoftheyear.org.au/pages/page265.asp.
Because of those early origins as a community geek, to this day the early I am still running community events and participating every chance I get!