I discovered the computer (PC) in 1997, being student, in secod year of college. In first year on college I was only learned Windows OS with pen on paper (no one have access to an PC). In 2000 I graduated and bough my first PC; for the first 2-3 years I have played games a lot, especially Age of Empires and messed up with Windows OS, starting with Win 95 up to Windows NT and Windows ME. Messing means fucking the OS so hard that after few days need re-install. Very soon I started to use apps for creating OS backup’s in order to restore quickly, to use dual boot and even 3 OS’s (2xWin + 1xLinux). I was hungry for software and downloaded as much as I can and test it; on those ages was DC++, oDC clients for file sharing, and even mIRC had some extensions for this. Playing around with netwok stuff was also another activity which kept me busy, but I didn’t managed so well, anyway, even nowdays almost everything related to routers, network settings, virtual servers, forwarding ports, etc I prefere to do it myself.
I remember early days of Google, who invited folks to install their Internet Explorer add-on, an toolbar which have, between may purposes, the goal to “see” what users are surfing and in such way to discover new websites, in order to grow his index. I remember that Google even offered some money (small amounts, anyway) for such “help” to it’s toolbar users.
Those days I have used some PC’s with UNIX operating system, no graphical interface, only text, looking for guitar tablatures on Altavista search engine or Yahoo – I underline, no GUI. Spreadsheet app which I have learned long before MS Excel was Lotus123:) And for database app we learned in college FoxPro, only years after we have seen MS Access. The network where the PC’s were, at university, was made on Novell Netware. In that time also we used Netscape Navigator as browser and Internet Explorer was crashing too often. I started to keep and transfer information from those “diskette” of 1,44 MB capacity, to install Windows 95 / 98 from such diskette, after that I had the chance to see and benefit from all improvements: CD’s, DVD’s, TF cards, SD cards, USB sticks.
I forgot to mention that at my first job (2000 – 2002) we mainly connect to internet through Dial-up (by modem, connected to phone landline). Do you what is it ? In fact IT WAS, because nowdays only old people remember about that technology. If you had the luck to catch 56 KB/s which was the maximum speed I think, you can consider very lucky. When the cable company bring us internet by UTP cable, even that the maximum theoretical speed was 100 MB/s we thought that we were in heaven.
In 2003-2006 I tried to crack and hack, even that (I guess I forgot to mention) my background is not in Computer Science 🙂 And some things I succeded, like cheating Kaspersky AntiVirus version 6 to run 2 weeks and I developed an vbscript to return it’s state to “fresh install” and use it again for free 2 weeks. Also I cracked the CD from Yellow Pages Romania, which was full of useful information about companies, thier phone numbers, staff, email address, etc, having all in an very quick and accesible way (an database) but hard to query all at once. I remember also I managed to crack WinFax, an expensive app which I cannot afford to buy at that time but was very important for me to send fax straight from PC, not to mess with printers and noisy and slow fax devices 🙂
In 2006 I have created my first website, who tried to promote a new kind of business (gold plating services and tools/equipments for this); the website was almost static, some html files linked together (by help of an template, I worked with Macromedia Dreamweaver 🙂 and few non-static things by help of some javascript snippets, gathered from the web. Anyway the result was nice, customer was very happy, he made sales, become notorius in our country, etc etc, and for me was the moment when I took the decision to stick with web design until retirement age. I need to specify that was also the moment when I discovered software for mass mail (let be honest: spam) sending, buying SMTP services, using 3-4 web spiders software in order to gather email addresses from around the web. Google was at the begining with their advertising services, I don’t remember to be an good solution for advertising at that time.
I remember that for a while I also have played with Flash Player, creating some websites in Macromedia Flash (which runs of course in Flash Player, the one who Windows 10 insist to unistall it from your system :). I even started to learn their scripting language, I think it’s name was ActionScript. But I never finished.
Since then I continued to be passionate of computers and especially software, trying something new like programming in PHP. Between 2008-2011 I developed myself an complete website, for my personal use, some sort of classifieds website; in this way I had also the chance to learn not only PHP but also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, a little bit of Apache settings, everything needed to run an classifieds website.
In 2014 I bough my first virtual private server and that was a good opportunity to learn Linux and get deeper into Apache settings. I still manage my own VPS and in 8 years only once I asked tech support from company from where I bought that service (and even so, the problem was an physical malfunction of HDD, not my fault). Now I host many of my websites on that VPS, dealing also with everything which involves this, like DNS management on own server, configuring DNS server and DNS entries, server backup software, server firewall config, email server config and the list can continue until you will fall asleep.
I always was tempted to look for issues and fix them. I mean, if there was quick solutions to solve an issue with an script, an web app, regarding the code, I never looked for quickest solution, in fact I tried always the “hard-way”, spending days or even weeks, unpacking everything and looking deep into code, until I found the solution. An example was an e-commerce script, ViartShop, maybe not very popular but use it by one of my customers as an product catalogue, cancelling it’s e-shop features. The script is free for testing but with some limits and is necessary to buy it if you want to add more products or use some paid features. Normally I can use the simple way, asking my customer to buy it, the amount was affordable, like 300 USD. But I wanted to play with, to crack (in fact null) it. It takes me 2 weeks. Was very difficult because developers hide some info through PHP code and was needed an very big brain to manage all those places. In such cases is very likely that what you discovered 2-3 days ago to forget, and you need to start over again :). After I do such things I promise myself that next time to choose the easy-way, bot not even once I kept my promise.
Now I work on all my computers (1 desktop at home, another one at office, and an powerful laptop, which is, of course, portable) in the same time, I managed to configure my networks in order to wake-up my PC’s from remote locations, even from my phone (playing around with router settings and Dynamic DNS), using 4 syncronization apps in the same time (Dropbox, GDrive, NextCloud, ownCloud – last 2 are private clouds, free, installed and configured and managed myself). I am very interested into classifieds scripts, in the last years I have tested almost all of them – only the big names – and choose few which I will use to start an business (I hope :).
On the other hand I look to create my own classifieds script because none of the scripts which I tested have all the features. After so many tests I think I have an ideea about how the perfect classifieds script should be but I am aware that it will take another 2-3-4 years untill will be ready 🙂
Who are you ? Why you spent your precious time reading this page ? Don’t have anything better to do ? Should I guess that you are: 1. curious; 2. drunk; 3. interested into an collaboration; 4. web spider ? Anyway, I write this page even from the begining of website creation (in fact, until now I wrote only 2 articles) and I don’t expect too many folks to be interested in “About me” 🙂
Now, go back to work !