Well, I live in a rural area with lots of mountains. Lived in Northern Utah until summer of 1991, when we moved to the city I live now. If you can call it a city... It was the summer before I turned 5. Shortly after we moved here, my parents got our firs computer... A lowly 286. I was too young to really remember much. My mom used it for work.
A year later, we moved to a different house. Same city. Actually, I now live about half a block from the old house. We bought a piece of property which was about 2 city lots. Our yard is roughly a quarter of an acre. Lots of room. Our house is puny, though. Started out as a log cabin, the walls were redone sometime in the 1950's (found a newspaper in the wall two summers ago), covering up the logs. It was also added onto. My room and my brother's room, as well as the utility/pantry area.
I didn't do much with computers until I was 9 or 10 and got to do some nifty computer games. Wacky Wheels I remember fondly. Beating my brother was so much fun!
When I was 12, I got my first computer. As in, mine. The school was giving away computers, my parents had an AMD K6-II 450MHz CPU in their computer. I got a lowly 486 DX2. I threw on Windows 95, experimented with OS/2 and DOS.
Actually, if we back up a bit, I don't know how old I was, but I got one of those vTech Precomputer Power Pads... It's sorta like a laptop for children.... :P Anyway, it included a BASIC program. I couldn't save any of the programs I wrote, but it got me intrested. It used the dollar sign on variables, I suppose that's why PHP variables came so easily to me.. :)
Later, I was probably 14 or so... I found myself with a Pentium 200 MMX computer with 64 MB RAM. I threw on Windows 98. This was where I really encountered the Internet. My dad had been using Juno for a while. I got my own free Juno account (before the merger with NetZero). We had two phone lines, so I could get on with my dinky 28.8 ISA modem without interrupting my mom's work. I got interested in HTML. I started researching what it would take to get a website.
I experimented with HTML code with 98's Personal Web Server -- a less advanced version of Windows IIS (Internet Information Services). I had a rudimentary understanding of basic HTML. Most coding tasks I could understand. I still had not mastered the art of tables, however. And that didn't really come until after I was working on SaveDisneyShows for a while.
Sometime in here, I got another 486 computer to complement my Athlon PC for the older games I so enjoyed. It was then that I created an advanced installation system using batch files. I even managed to acquire a trial version of InstallShield Express, and was able to create Windows installations of many things.
We brought Wayne onto SDS because of his help to me. It was a long time ago. We were both on the forum now known as ARA. It was from Wayne, I gained an understanding of tables. After he created a couple of email scripts, I could do that much and change the various variables. I had very little understanding of PHP.
As I got working with Wayne, and phpBB, and adding in modifications, I learned a lot about PHP. After a while, I felt quite comfortable with PHP, and a friend wanted to set up a special site where people could go that was dedicated to a special show, Kim Possible. It took us days to figure out database functionality. But as I had more time to spend (didn't have a job, and Wayne did), I was able to figure it out and unlock the power of MySQL-driven websites.
The Kim Possible Fan Fiction project led to the FanFiction Portal project, which we work on from time to time as time permits. It was actually just before the KPFF project that TheScripters.com came into existence. Wayne had this username on his ASP host "thescripter1981" and I asked him what he thought about "TheScripters.com" and he liked it. So we made this site to see if we could bring in some extra income.
I like working with computers, I worked as a computer techinician over the summer of 2001, which is how I managed to afford the computer I am now sitting at typing this.
The area I live in has many wonders, while in scouts I've gotten to visit and do many of them. There are lakes, mountains, places to hike. There are some excellent camp grounds around. I live out in the middle of nowhere, 70 miles from the closest Wal-Mart. The entire valley has maybe 2000 people. Within city limits is only roughly 1000. My senior class size was 28 at graduation.
Our city does very littel for Independence Day. No, instead it's "Atomic Days" - the third weekend of July, I believe. It's to celebrate the day that EBR-1 (a nuclear power plant about 20 miles east) first supplied power to the city of Arco almost 50 years ago at 11:30 at night for like 5-10 minutes. The next big holiday is Homecoming. Significantly smaller than Atomic Days, but still twice as big as Indepence Day.
