Get to know: The Techie Talk folks

[Largest of Gregs]

i want a medway boys tattoo!, and one of a line of bombs

[Largest of Gregs]

infact aye, im going to get these done

[sinister]

Originally Posted by Largest of Gregs

i want a medway boys tattoo!

and one of a line of bombs

HAha, that would be awesome!

[Largest of Gregs]

aye i know you have one!!!

I just want one too. Ill think about placement then make a wee appointment to get my bombs done

[sinister]

Fuck it I'm gonna get 3-4 bombs on my foot as well!

[Largest of Gregs]

ill get them done on my leg when i get some cash together

[PapaZeb]

Of the entire techie talk crew, Sinister's definitely the most hardcore.

I mean, growing up I spent ages as a kid playing games bought out the Barras that he and his mates had cracked and I never even knew him to give him thanks.

[Mulac]

Originally Posted by PapaZeb

O
I mean, growing up I spent ages as a kid playing games bought out the Barras that he and his mates had cracked and I never even knew him to give him thanks.

Same here, I had stacks of them.

[CyberSpunk]

As I'm new here and keen to be classified a techie I'll post a quick resume.

Started at college originally doing architecture, but early CAD with 3d rendering side tracked me. Transferred to an IT course by way of a sabbatical. Lost interest before graduating and left for my current job. Which I've been doing for 8 years.

Started off on Novell 3.1 and 4.2 running on a token ring network.

Migrated to Microsoft NT just before Novell 5 launched as various Software vendors we used were going SQL and wouldn't support it under Novell. They wouldn't support Oracle under Novell either. Around this time I re-wired the office to Cat5e and 10/100 auto sensing switches.

Couple of years later had to add some more servers so migrated to Win2k but deployed it on VMWare, so ran a 4 server Virtual Win2k network off of 3 Linux boxes. at the same time I set up a 3 office VPN and Citrix Server Farm and added a NAS box along with several networked digital copier/printers.

Have recently added full VOIP phone system, Gigabit switching, and I am working on Full off site disaster recovery plans. I have just replaced the original VPN with new 5 site VPN over Cisco 877 wireless routers. The NAS has also been relegated to backup duties in favour of a Clustered Network Drive Array. Will also have finished the migration to Win2k3 shortly.

I also have Macs for graphic design work and general mcuking about on. I also run the AV side of things too.

I'm not really a gamer, but have been buggering about inside boxes since about 1986.

My first machine was an Oric1 (think ZX but not as popular) followed by an Amstrad CPC464. Great days remember the days of tweaking the tape drives volume control to get your games to load?

This was followed by my first PC an 8086 and the rest is history. I'm a bit of a hoarder so I can still lay my hands on a 286, 386, 486, and Pentium machine. I have also had to support Paxus machines, no HD and dual 5.25 floppy drives.

Also spent some time working for Tandy as the store tech geek.

[PapaZeb]

This thread could probably go a spring cleaning, or perhaps an updating...

Due to conflicts at work, I was let go at my last job (office politics are generally a bitch) - I walked out and called the guy that hired me for that job over a year ago (he'd also been forced out by politics about 6 months before, oddly enough)

Now I'm doing primarily VOIP and analog (PRI/T1 and POTS) PBX rollouts, doing T1 turn ups, PBX programming, and just generally relaxing at the moment. The company I'm contracting with that's owned by former employer also does AV work (wall-mounting plasma tvs, properly hooking up HDTV and the like as well as internal cable runs through walls and whatnot), business cabling and phones, and currently we're the only people that do phones and are contracted out by Las Vegas' version of NTL to help do their new analog phone division.
I'm also tied up with a few maintenance contracts on Microsoft CRM rollouts, writing reports in SQL Reporting Services and modifying their applications when required.

In my spare time, working with Ruby on Rails, due to its fast and speedy development nature and chiefly CRUD application use (therefore very usable by various people)

Anyone else shift in the last 8-9 months then?

[Largest of Als]

See, thats all bit TOO techie for me...


I'm like David Carradine in Kung Fu.. walking the earth with my laptop, constantly in search of unprotected WiFi networks in various countries..
Often found shouting at people to give me the SMTP server address so I can send the mail that the record company has been harrassing me for for the last 3 days and cursing the fact that the nearest powerpoint is JUST our of the range of the WiFi router..



Basically, I know a little about alot.... but not much about the real hardcore techie stuff.


Al

[GreatKingRat]

I do web development and SEO. That is all.

[sinister]

I'm getting more into the car ecu firmware modification stuff these days. Been put off the HD-DVD region code mod chip idea a bit now since I had a look inside a player and found it was basically a PC running linux, as I refuse to look at x86 code on grounds of taste.

Just finished development of some hardware/software for my ST (or rather Tony poprock's STE he was good enough to give me since my own one was RIP ) to allow dumping of ECU firmware chips.

[crusher]

At age of 14 I worked in a mainframe computer environment just as a summer job, then the corporation that I worked for called me a few months later and asked if I would like to work for them when I left school at 16.
They made sure I worked in the computer centre and made me go to college to get qualifications. I started out as an operator on IBM 370/158's and 159's did that for 5 years and made friends with a few programmers and started learning COBOL and Pascal. I preferred knowing about the hardware side of things though. Eventually I found I had to get to grips with Client/Server networking and went to a company that installed networks for medium and large enterprises spent a few years learning the ropes. Then went to a smaller company as I had really got fed up with the whole office politics thing you can get bogged down with at bigger companies.
Afeter that, however I had saved some money and went off for a couple of years - first touring Europe then living on sth coast of Britain

Moved to London and started up a business with a couple of other people providing networks and support for small to medium businesses and then after a couple of years we sorta went our separate ways as they felt web design was where they wanted to be and I wanted to stay on the network side of it, so here I am running my own small company and doing OK nothing to complain about, building the business up and just ticking over nicely - I have been getting into Linux servers over the last couple of years but wouldnt consider myself a guru of Linux. I know my stuff tho but like everyone tho I am still learning. So I have a great deal of experience in all aspects of computing and am still doing the science !

Problem is I cant find any enthusiasm for programming or scripting anymore so I never really answer people on that score but I love setting up servers and getting things to run in a mean lean way I suppose I am a network techy - oh and modifying stuff - hardware and software hacks - firmware hacks all that sorta stuff