Welcome to Aerowave. This is my introductory post to give you—the reader—background information about me and how I came to be acquainted with technology. I’m 25 years old and have always held an interest in technology throughout my life. As a child I played
Atari 2600, listened to music on cassettes in an AM/FM cassette radio (and sometimes even vinyl on a kids toy record player), watched movies on Beta (and later VHS), watched TV on a “modern” (for the 80’s) television with faux wood grain casing, took photos with a disk film camera, and was exposed to my first computer at the age of nine.
Throughout my life I’ve been in love with video games. I’ve owned many systems and began on my dad’s
Atari 2600 when I was probably 3 years old. Around the age of seven I got
Nintendo, the bundle that came with the Powerpad and Light Gun, and had Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and World Class Track Meet all on one cart. From then on I craved new systems when they came out. My systems that followed included:
Super Nintendo,
Sega Genesis,
Gameboy,
Gameboy Pocket,
Gamegear,
Virtual Boy (albeit I never asked for this system because I, like many, knew it was going to be a failure),
Nintendo 64,
Playstation,
Dreamcast,
Playstation 2,
Gamecube,
Nintendo DS, and PC. The systems I currently own today include:
Playstation 2,
Gamecube,
Super Nintendo,
Nintendo DS, and PC. My favorite games have included: the Final Fantasy series, the Resident Evil series, the Metroid series, the Zelda series, the Ratchet and Clank series, the Age of Empires series, The Sims 2 and it’s expansion packs, Tales of Destiny, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, SSX3, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Tetris, and Meteos.
How I listen to my music has changed dramatically since I was a child. I said goodbye to cassettes during the summer of 1994 when I got my first job and bought a Sharp stereo sound 6+1 CD player with dual cassette deck and AM/FM radio. Sure, I could still play my old tapes, but now with CD technology at my fingertips why would I? Goodbye fast forward and rewind, Hello, track skipping! The next leap for me among music technology was the Mp3. I discovered these while away at college studying psychology and having an always-on internet connection available to me. At that point I, like thousands of Americans, pirated my music through the use of Peer-to-Peer programs like Napster, Morpheus, and Bear Share. Later it would be Kazaa and Emule. When the RIAA formed I was a little hesitant but continued downloading nonetheless all thanks to Tech TV host
Kevin Rose and one of his dark tips about how using Kazaa Lite Resurrection blocks the RIAA. The next big music technology breakthrough to impact my life was
Apple’s iTunes and iTunes Music Store. This made it so easy to organize and play my music because the program had such a user friendly and appealing interface. Additionally, I began to pay for my music through iTunes because I had had enough of tagging songs I’d downloaded (I’m still tagging files!). Now when it comes to pirating music I follow the words of another former Tech TV host,
Leo Laporte, “Buy your music online and if you can’t find something, then download it elsewhere”. At the beginning of this year I bought my first iPod, an
iPod Shuffle. I love it! However, I still can’t wait to be the proud owner of a 4GB black
iPod Nano and a 60GB black
iPod.
I’ve had a few TVs throughout the years and the best way to describe them is by how they connect to a signal. I, like most have owned a TV with an RF connector input (my 19” Zenith with faux wood grain); I’ve also had a tiny 13” black and white TV with nothing but UHF/VHF connectors. I actually got an RF adapter to hook my game systems up to it. When I tried connecting 3 game systems at once I think I blew out the TV, because the screen ceased working after that. At present my 19” Zenith is stored away and I use a
Sylvania 15” LCD TV that I have mounted to my wall. It has several inputs: S-Video, Composite, Component, and RF. I like it a lot, but wish it was a little bigger so it would be easier to play games further away.
As a child I had received my first camera as a gift on a birthday. It took typical pictures but used disk film which by now is something left to photographers and is no longer marketed to the general public. Since that time I had a fairly cheap Minolta camera that was a hand-me-down and eventually broke. Then, in 2001 I got a decent film camera. It was a
Samsung Maxima Zoom 90GL. I got a lot of great pictures out of it and still have it today. In addition to that I also have a Polaroid iZone pocket camera for those occasions when friends and I are goofing around. With the current popularity of digital cameras, I choose to get one of my own this year. After I researched digital cameras for about a week in early summer, I opted to get a
Canon Powershot S500 and
1GB SimpleTech Compact Flash card. It came with a couple Arcsoft photo programs, but I personally like to use Google’s
Picasa 2. I also upload my photos and images to
Flickr.com.
My first exposure to computers was at the age of 9 when my parents decided to purchase a 1989 IBM PC compatible computer because my dad worked at IBM. If memory serves me correctly it had all of 512k of RAM and ran on DOS 2.0. So this was my family’s first computer (which I later inherited during high school and only trashed 2-3 years ago). Other early exposure to computers for me included weird looking microcomputers and early Apple Macintosh computers throughout middle school and early high school. The microcomputers were odd black box-shaped systems with handles and a 4 inch square screen that only displayed one color—green—on a black background. For either science or math the class would have to program sprites to draw basic geometric objects. Talk about fun! The Apple Macintosh computers were those old white box shaped systems that had a 3.5 in. floppy drive and displayed three colors: black, white, grey, and those shades in-between. My school replaced all their Macs with PCs (complete with Windows 95) when I was halfway through high school and as dumb as this may sound, I actually had a hard time getting used to PCs. But then again, I had been accustomed to doing schoolwork on a Mac by then. During the latter two years of high school I would hear the terms “instant messaging”, “chat”, and “DVD” for the first time, but would not become acquainted with the technologies until a couple years after high school (at the time I avoided chat/IM knowing it only to be something people abused thanks to my friend who pretended to be a woman so he could harass and play dirty tricks on men online). Also, during those last two years I took my first technology course which exposed me to website design for the first time. It was in this class that I learned how to hand code static web pages. I can recall found memories of hand coding for hours just to make complex sets of tables look right. After high school I leisurely took computer courses at the local community college telling myself I was going to get a degree in computers, only to give it up after taking intro to C/C++ programming in my second year. I passed the course, but it was part one of a two part course and I was thoroughly confused by the end of it. The whole concept of flags got the better of me though I'd like to think that I'd probably have a better understanding of it today because I had been an ever improving student during college. I did however enjoy courses that revolved around web design (though CSS, XML, and other languages we use today didn’t even exist yet at this time). I also benefited from my PC hardware and local area networks courses. They left me intrigued and wanting to experiment with my own computer, an overpriced 1998 333MHz, 7.5GB, 64MB RAM Packard-Bell. From here on out I gave up computers as a profession but pursued it as a hobby and probably learned more from my own interest than while I was studying them. I should, however, point out that I am no computer genius, but more along the lines of a savvy computer tweaker with a penchant for hardware upgrades. In 2002 I replaced my Packard-Bell with a 1.8GHz, 40GB, 256MB RAM Dell Dimension 4500 which is what I still use today and hope to replace late 2006. My favorite upgrades for my Dell include: an
ATI All-in-Wonder 9200, an additional 40GB
Maxtor HD, a
Sound Blaster Live! 24-Bit soundcard, and 1GB of RAM. This year I also purchased my first laptop, a HP Pavilion ze5700. It has 2.8GHz, 60GB, a DVD-Rom/CD-R/RW, but only a measly 256MB RAM. I have a
Linksys Wireless G Router setup and as soon as I can I’m going to upgrade the laptop RAM to 1GB. Lastly, some of the programs I like using include: Mozilla
Firefox &
Thunderbird,
iTunes,
iPodderX,
AIM,
BitTorrent,
Skype,
AVG Anti-virus, and
Microsoft AntiSpyware.
After being exposed to all these tech products throughout the years I have definitely come to view myself as a technology enthusiast. I hope that in the coming months I will create a useful and interesting blog focused on technology.
~Mike
