How I got my start - Part 2

During that first year at Mary Baldwin, I started to pick up some habits. One in particular was starting to read internet resources more. CNET, Wired, Tech Republic. I got Network World magazine mailed to the office.

In hindsight, plenty of it was garbage in terms of learning anything technical, but it was good to be not only exposing myself to more, but simply building the habit of keeping up with technology news sources. I started the habit of my "daily tech" bookmarks that I'd open each morning at work. Tech Republic at least had some technical articles/cheat sheets. This was one of the points that I started saving more things that I found. It was a disorganized mess, but finding a word doc or pdf or something that I found somewhat interesting and saving it on my work computer.

So many times throughout my career, I'd have a "where did I see this before?" Being able to easily find the file you had found was extremely handy. I would also spend time simply going through the files from time to time. I might be trying to think through ways that I could implement things or just pretend that I was an Active Directory admin (I still had no real idea what Active Directory did).

Things finally started kicking off in 2008 in terms of learning at home. I was very fortunate in my dad giving me a new home computer - a Dell XPS 210. A small form factor system running Windows XP.

I can't explain enough how much of an upgrade this was. My old computer was something along these lines:

Coming from the old school Dell Dimensions to something...sexy? It was pretty wild. But I didn't simply get rid of the old computer. By this point in time, one of my roommates had moved out and I opted to take over his room as my home 'office'. I had two desks amazingly - a corner desk that I kept until about 2022 and a regular style desk I still have now. The corner desk had my gaming setup and the other desk sat just to the right of it. I had no shortage of games that I played by that point - Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Far Cry 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. I shutter to think how many hours I spent gaming back then.

However, I had the urge to have "background noise" while I played - especially when playing something like Far Cry 2. I might be traveling between areas or very slowly sneaking through an outpost, but would crave something to listen to or maybe even watch. My housemate at the time had a DVD collection that filled a wall and I opted to use my old computer to be a "TV" of sorts. I had very loosely dabbled in Ubuntu Linux before and ended up ordering one of the CDs to install it. Way back then, you could get free Ubuntu CDs mailed to your house. DVD burners were still not as common and USB booting definitely wasn't. I still have a bunch of those Ubuntu CDs. I got some version installed (I have CDs going back to version 6) and, after some finagling, was able to play DVDs (Ubuntu by default wouldn't play them, you had to install some additional packages). So now I could game in peace, while Scrubs played in the background.

But amazingly, I started to play around with the other system a bit more. The Ubuntu Software Center had some cool free applications (GNUCash, Stellarium, etc). It become another computer I could Google things on. Much like I had done with Windows all my years before, I started just clicking on everything - seeing what the various settings and knobs were. I blew the computer away and installed newer versions of Ubuntu. I even blew it away and tried a few other Linux flavors - OpenSUSE, Fedora, OpenBSD, Mint, etc. I also messed around with Xfce vs Gnome. I became partial to Mint Linux for the GUI.

Ubuntu Server was an option at this point, but since I used it as a full blown computer, the Desktop version was necessary (I may have installed that version once or twice, just to try it).

At this point in time, virtual machines were becoming more of a thing, but ESXi (the free version of VSphere) wasn't readily available yet. I think I may have just started playing around with it near the end of my time at Mary Baldwin (I left in August 2011), but was still limited by hardware to run things on. VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server (both of which would run on an OS itself) were around, but I rarely used those. Since my Ubuntu machine was still directly next to me - I didn't have to SSH or anything like that.

This also became the very earliest time that I wrote things I learned down (not nearly enough). And I mean physically wrote it down in a notebook. Ubuntu/Linux as a whole didn't have nearly the adoption that it does now. That, combined with the difficult time of searching for this sort of info on the internet, if you could find a way to make something work, you wrote it down. It was tough to get into some of the homelab stuff at that point in time just due to lack of content. Today, you have a million people with blogs, YouTube channels, even TikTok. You can go to Reddit and ask questions. Back then, you had to hope to find a forum that would have an answer. People were very full of themselves with Linux and wouldn't be helpful at all.

At the same time, there wasn't nearly as much stuff to learn. Docker, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Splunk, etc - those either didn't exist, were so early in their development, or simply didn't have means of getting run at home (as in you would need to do it at work). Moreover, smart phones really didn't exist (or were super early), so Googling things or checking anything while you're out was impossible. It was an interesting combination of things

Eventually, I started getting video files themselves to play off my "Media Computer". I had an external hard drive that I stored the video files on (I would also take it to and from work) and watch files directly off of it. I'm pretty sure it was VLC player that I used at that point, but honestly I don't recall.

But tragedy struck. One day I went to play one of my many shows, but the drive couldn't be read. I did every trick I could find to try and recover it, but the entire thing was gone. I was pretty devastated. It was thankfully just my external media and not personal photos and such (what few digital photos I had at the time), but it had still been the culmination of many many months of acquiring things. I set about slowly starting to get what I once had, but clearly I was in need of a better setup...