I hail from the city of Oxnard,
California. Most people know where California is but not Oxnard, so when I say
it is near Hollywood and Malibu that rings a bell for them and now all of a
sudden my hometown is interesting. One
day before I moved to Kansas when I was working customer service at Target, Tom
Cruise came into the store to return a bottle of Tylenol. That is when I realized he is one weird
dude. This was before I worked on the
same movie set as him. He wasn't acting
in the movie, he must have been producing it because he was just there
observing. To this day I don't know the
title of the movie because this was during the time Tom Cruise was in the
limelight and everything was kept a secret with him. And so the contract company that hired me
didn't really advertise that he would be on the set.
Growing
up near the beach was an amazing experience, I would always escape to the pier
whenever life seemed overwhelming and just gaze at the ocean. It would give me
some certain clarity of how the universe worked. Especially at night during red tide when the
red algae lights up everything that moves in the water and makes it seem like
you are looking at one universe on top of the another. Some might say I have a big family, I have
three brothers and one sister, and a single mother raised all of us. My father wasn't in the picture, he bailed on
us a long time ago. He tried being in my
life and making it up to me when he heard I joined the Army back in 2008, but I
told him it was too late and being a father isn't meant for everyone. Now I'm a father and my main goal in life is
to be the father I never had to my 19 month old son. So far I think I am doing a wonderful job, so
I can pat myself on the back without any guilt for all my effort.
Like
I said before, I joined the US Army in October of 2008 and my job was to program computer networks, radio networks,
satellite networks, repair and maintain computers, provide technical assistance
to personnel, train new soldiers, and to come up with innovating and more
efficient ways to do my job. Because as
you know the IT world is constantly changing.
Before I joined the Army I attended one of the birth places of the Internet as a Computer Science major - the University of California in Santa Barbara. I went there for a semester and then transferred to Ventura Community College. I had nothing against UCSB, it's a great school with an outstanding Computer Science program, going to the school just became too expensive . I have had an infatuation with UCSB. I first made my decision that I wanted to attend UCSB when I was in high school and president of the Computer Club that I was in decided to enter me in a Web Page Design Contest that was being held at UCSB. I was going up against college students and I was supposed to be representing the only high school entry. I had some experience with HTML because I built my high school web site so I figured, "Why not?". Back then there were no different versions of HTML, it wasn't HTML 4, or 5, it was just HTML. I went to UCSB with a small team from my Computer Club and the nervousness didn't set in until we arrived and I found out we were going up against colleges like Cal Polly and USC. Me being nervous made the programming a little more difficult than I anticipated but it was in vein because we won the contest. There was an article about us in the Ventura Star for outsmarting all those universities. That event sparked my interest in web design even more. After high school I taught myself more advanced languages like PHP and Javascript and began building databases using MySQL so my programming would be more dynamic. The best part about PHP and MySQL is everything you need to program in these languages is free. I took full advantage of this and built and maintained my own Apache web server for a couple of years so I can host my own websites from the comfort of my own home and not spend a single dollar while doing it.
Before I joined the Army I attended one of the birth places of the Internet as a Computer Science major - the University of California in Santa Barbara. I went there for a semester and then transferred to Ventura Community College. I had nothing against UCSB, it's a great school with an outstanding Computer Science program, going to the school just became too expensive . I have had an infatuation with UCSB. I first made my decision that I wanted to attend UCSB when I was in high school and president of the Computer Club that I was in decided to enter me in a Web Page Design Contest that was being held at UCSB. I was going up against college students and I was supposed to be representing the only high school entry. I had some experience with HTML because I built my high school web site so I figured, "Why not?". Back then there were no different versions of HTML, it wasn't HTML 4, or 5, it was just HTML. I went to UCSB with a small team from my Computer Club and the nervousness didn't set in until we arrived and I found out we were going up against colleges like Cal Polly and USC. Me being nervous made the programming a little more difficult than I anticipated but it was in vein because we won the contest. There was an article about us in the Ventura Star for outsmarting all those universities. That event sparked my interest in web design even more. After high school I taught myself more advanced languages like PHP and Javascript and began building databases using MySQL so my programming would be more dynamic. The best part about PHP and MySQL is everything you need to program in these languages is free. I took full advantage of this and built and maintained my own Apache web server for a couple of years so I can host my own websites from the comfort of my own home and not spend a single dollar while doing it.
I have two
reasons why I enrolled in this class. The first one is because it is mandatory to graduate with a Computer Systems Information degree, and the second one is because there is WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and WHY, but I want to get a better understanding of HOW computers work.
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