Growing Up Geek - Jess James
Ya know what's funny? I'm 41 years old and one of the things I'm most proud of in all my life is that I have been tinkering with technology almost as long as there has been technology to tinker with. Perhaps even more importantly is that I've been playing video games for as long as video games have existed. These are things which I feel have defined me in every significant way. I can't work out if that's something that should trouble me.
Ya know what else? I offer thanks to anyone in a position to receive them for my parents in this regard. When I was about 5 years old they bought me an Atari 2600 games console (still the best version of Space Invaders ever made). A few years later, bless their generous hearts, they bought me a ZX Spectrum 128k. A few years after that an Atari ST. By the time PC's were a thing I could buy it for myself with my paper round money, and I had myself a 386 SX PC with Windows 3.1 and DOS.
All I knew about these things when they miraculously turned up under the Christmas tree was that they were new, they were cool and that I wanted them. What I didn't realise was that I was navigating a journey through technology and video games which would consume my adult life, with a 20+ year career (so far) as an Linux Systems Engineer running right through the middle.
Most of the defining events of my life seem to center around this very subject matter. Some of my earliest memories involve being huddled around Night Driver, Combat or Missile Command on the Atari console. I can't remember the very important thing my wife said to me last night, but I can vividly recall playing Manic Miner and Magnetic Scrolls adventure games on my Spectrum (seriously the guy who designed Fish! was a sadist). I can remember getting my first ever mouse with my Atari ST and being completely confused as to what "double-click" meant. I remember recording music of my own for the first time ever by plugging a MIDI keyboard into my Atari ST. I remember booting up Dungeon Master and Doom for the first time, and just how exciting they were.
Want to know about some of the strongest early memories I have of my oldest friend and I? Playing Monkey Island, Sam n Max and Day of the Tentacle together, and going to a computer wholesaler to pick up my first ever Pentium chip for my new PC I was building. I currently live in America and my family in England, and technology has been the solution to that problem as well.
At school I liked to work in the computer clubs, went to University to learn to be a programmer, spent literally countless hours of my free time building PC's, tinkering with scripts, installing Linux and plugging cables into stuff. It's everywhere and it's in everything. It's burned into every part of me. At both ends of my life and every step of the way in between there is one of constant. Hell, I met my wife online about 15 years ago.
I am a musician, I like to draw and take photographs, I ride motorcycles, I have friends and family and I'm English, which means I like a beer now and again. Despite all these utterly fascinating and impressive things you can say about me, if someone were to ask me to tell them something about myself I would most likely say I was a dedicated video gamer and a passionate technologist.
Today? Let me describe some of my day today. I browse the net on my Acer C720 Chromebook, which is running Ubuntu 14.04. For reasons which will not be interesting to anyone but me I've been without a smartphone for around a year now, so I spent some of my browsing time investigating my options to finally right this terrible wrong. I spent a couple of hours playing Witcher 3 and then when my wife came home from visiting with a friend we played Elder Scrolls Online together for a bit. Oh, and I spent a little time reorganising the media inside my Plex Media Server. These days my hair is grey and I'm a little wider around the mid-section but when I think about it I'm doing the same things I've been doing my whole entire life.
This was intended to be about growing up geek, but to be honest I'm not sure my geek has grown up at all.
