Scope, Shains, & Closure

I enjoy learning. Everything.

The internet has made learning about computers possible for me. Sharing that enthusiasm could be classed as “teaching” but teaching and learning are intrinsically coupled.

Circumstances aligned when I was 27. I recieved a 200MHz Acer Extensa 355 with 16MB of RAM at just the same time as I befriended a person who had lived computers so long they were currently burnt out. Even so, they taught me the importance of self-research by thoroughly ignoring any question I had that didn’t already show significant independent effort.

So, loaded with Windows 98 and a pcmcia Xircom RealPort™ for modem and ethernet I proceeded to hang out with them while being taught how to not ask stupid questions.

Which was fine by me because some of the raving bipolar geniuses I had been mentored by in other fields had toughened me to anything that life could throw my way.

So when the unceremonial time came to reinstall that sad sad Win98 machine I had to spend quite some time figuring out the registry hack which would get the Xircom modem working again.

And that was just to get networking. Because it was a laptop without a network card. Think about that for a second…

Well that didn’t last very long and I soon had a mysterious stranger leave me with a base RedHat install with no GUI and no knowledge of what Linux was…

So now I’m 15 years on the other side of that starting adventure and I’m still learning every day.

And as I’m currently funemployed and awaiting visas, I thought it a great time to live-stream some current learnings via Twitch TV.

I’ve started with Node.js and I think there’s a good chance I’ll do a bunch of Software Defined Radio (SDR) as well.

So please do feel free to follow me as @gareth__ on Twitter and @gareth_codes on Twitch.

And let me know if you have any problems getting started with Nodeschool. Happy to help.

p.s I now have 8 Cores running at 2.6 GHz chomping on 64 bit memory addresses with a tidy 16GB of RAM. I think my first hard drive was 20GB.


Current interests: