User:Capedude2005
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CapeDude's UserBox
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[edit] Welcome to CapeDude2005's User Page!
Hello and welcome to the user page for CapeDude2005. I am a former employee of Sony Electronics, Inc. and worked at their Sony CISC facility in the Fort Myers, Florida subdivision of Gateway, Florida for approximately 5 years.Capedude2005 02:45, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Preamble
Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers did... oh, geez, I can't even keep a straight face writing this. No, this isn't a constitution or some other legal document, but I thought that, well, heck this is Wikipedia, right? All official and ivory tower and such, so somewhere there just has to be a preamble. Anyhow, now you can have the satisfaction of saying "Geez, I found a preamble on Wikipedia!"
How wonderful for you.
[edit] About Me
(and it is all about me, isn't it? -- j/k)
Anyhow, I am an escaped Ohioan who's been living in Florida for, well, since I was a child, really. And no, I don't speak with a southern accent. Actually, Florida should (in my opinion, at least) be claimed as a satellite northern state due to the population demographics.
| In case you are interested... |
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| Some people like to have a voice to go along with the words they read. I find that, particularly when I am reading a work of any length or consequence I prefer to have some sort of voice in mind. I know that if I'm reading something that I've watched performed (say, a Tom Clancey novel or a Dr. Who novelization), I find that I "hear" the voices of the various actors involved as I'm reading their dialog. Or perhaps it's just me being crazy. Well, whatever the case, if you can imagine a male mid-western accented voice of about average register, you've got me. If you'd prefer, you can also imagine me doing this with a radio announcer's inflections (which I am also able to do in real life, though I've never been a professional D.J.).
I mean, you can imagine this text read by a beautiful woman with a deep, sensuous voice if you like. It's a free universe. It's just that then it won't sound like me. |
[edit] Biography
Right. This is the part where I'm supposed to be very serious and scholarly and academic. So pay no heed whatsoever to me wearing a pair of headphones listening to Billy Idol doing a live performance of "Mony Mony" as I'm writing this. Oh, and the fact that I'm sitting in a chair, hunched over my laptop, wearing a pair of jeans and barefoot after a long day at my day job.
My "formal" education includes 13 years of school (kindergarten through 12th grade), one college class (and it was an "Intro to College" class at that), and a year at a local vocational adult school. However, my practical experience makes up for many of my other "higher education" deficiencies.
The first computer I used was an Apple IIc in seventh grade. I was exposed to typing at that point (though there were no teachers on staff who either could type or knew how to properly instruct a typing class), Applesoft BASIC, and Logo, which was a child-oriented basic-programming-concepts language. In 1986 I got my first computer, a Macintosh Plus. I'd actually been familiar with the Mac since mid-1985 when I got to experiment with a Mac 128 and Mac 512 at a local computer and home electronics exposition. All other computers of the era (within the reach of a normal person) were text-driven. It wasn't until about the time the Mac Plus came out that we started to see things such as the Amiga and Atari ST, both of which had GUIs. In any event, I was in heaven and felt so liberated.
Back then, most people who bought their own "Personal Computer" fell into one of two groups that I'll call hobbyists and enthusiasts. These two groups overlap significantly in their areas of interest, but hobbyists often came from an electronics background (formal or informal) and were the first people out there to actually "build" their own computers, usually from kits and so forth. Enthusiasts may or may not have built their own computer, but were just as passionate about owning one as a hobbyist, and usually focused their attentions on more of the software end of things. Many computer programmers came from these ranks. This isn't to say that enthusiasts were uninterested in hardware -- far from it, actually -- but we were more interested in what we could do with the computer and the other things we had at hand. And if you're sitting there reading this and thinking, "Geez, the distinctions between computer hobbyist and enthusiast are just as murky as the distinction between Hard Rock and Heavy Metal," believe me when I say I can sympathize.
Anyhow, I hail from the "enthusiast" side. I was and indeed have always been someone who wants to "see where we can go with x technology or y program or z hardware". Also, as a Mac user, I have always had to be self-sufficient, since there's never been the industry-wide support for Apple's 680x0 / PowerPC hardware platform or operating system that there has been and is for the Intel/AMD x86 hardware and Microsoft DOS/Win3.1/Win95->Vista platform. It's a fact, whether I much appreciate it or not, and one that has informed my thinking and influenced my approach to many things.
I've also been a professional desktop publisher/graphic designer for many years. This has traditionally been one of Apple's core markets and strongholds, both because creative types typically prefer what the Mac has to offer and because, frankly, up to the point where Intel and AMD started releasing 600MHz+ systems, there wasn't the hardware performance capability on the PC side to do what you could with a Mac. (This doesn't even begin to address the limitations one would encounter on pre-Win2K systems that also imparted severe drawbacks on using a PC. However, I'm not interested in turning my bio into a computer platform religious flame war.)
I have used many different computer platforms over the years, including the Apple II/IIe/IIc; Macintosh 128 -> Mac Pro/MacBook/MacBook Pro; Atari ST; Amiga; Commodore 64/128; TRS-80 Models I, II, III and IV; and of course the ubiquitous IBM PC-compatible platform from it's roots as an 8088-based system through it's migration to the 80286 and on up through the Pentium and now the Core2Duo. I've used several versions of MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows95, Windows 98, Windows ME (gak!), Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP Home/Pro/MCE. I've also done professional on-site/phone based support for Windows 3.1 -> WinXP, PalmOS 3 -> 5, and Mac OS 6 -> Mac OS X Tiger. In addition to this I have also done my fair share of consulting, solutions-building, and very very light networking.
I worked for Sony for approximately five years doing phone-based tech support and customer management in their Sony CISC facility. As some of you already know, I'm the author of the Sony CISC article here on Wikipedia. I felt that my time at the facility qualified me to discuss the Sony CISC, since clearly nobody else (including Sony) had done so. And despite whatever good or bad feelings I may have regarding Sony, that facility and my time there, in my opinion the only proper way to author a Wikipedia entry was to do it in a fair and impartial fashion. I've gone back numerous times to editorially correct additions and changes others have made, my goal being to ensure the article and all further changes were accurate and followed the general rules of style for an encyclopedic entry.
Sometime around 1998 I was first exposed to Linux. All I can say is that Linux has come a considerable distance since then, and in ways far too numerous to mention here. It was while I was still working for Sony that I began to semi-seriously pursue Linux, having built and upgraded several computers on which I installed at least four different distributions of Linux. Some of them were even configured to separately run both Linux and Windows (also known as "dual-booting"). Too my eyes, the Linux world (which by nature and almost of necessity) has a demographic which is almost perfectly the reverse of the demographics for any other computer platform. Most people who have and use Linux are hard-core computer users; most of them write some degree of code; none of them are afraid of rolling up their sleeves and being 100% self-sufficient. While the current Linux culture does harken back to the days of yore in the computer world at large, they are far more intense than we used to be. The term "RTFM" -- which stands for Read The F------ Manual -- originates from them and, curiously, sums them up quite well. Nevertheless, the ethics and standards of the Linux crowd -- and for that matter the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Software (OSS) movement seems to draw ever closer with my own, long-held position in computers, as well as in a number of other aspects of my life.
I know that much of what I've written here seems to be very little biography and much more a history of computers, and while on a prima facia basis this may be true, bear in mind that computers and the computer industry has been my life for these same 20 years. However, as context is everything (or so I believe), I told you that so I could tell you this: I have made the decision to bow out of the tech industry generally as a "practicing professional" due to ethical differences I have with the industry. These differences principally, though not exclusively, center around what I consider to be it's over-commercialization and emphasis on domination and control of the general public.
If it seems to you that I'm not exactly your typical "high school graduate", you may be right. I have spent a lot of my life working and generally experiencing the world as it actually is. I have also spent many, many hours in philosophical exercises and debates (both with myself and many others) which have, you might say, gotten me to the point at which I now am.
I presently work for an undisclosed employer "out of industry". This has freed me up (for the most part) to keep my working life and my hobbies and other personal interests completely separate.
[edit] Areas of Interest/Specialty
- Computers (generally); Mac OS (Classic and X) and Linux specifically
- Digital Photography
- Desktop Publishing/Graphic Design
- Learning and Education
- Etymology of words in multiple languages
- Reading (generally); science fiction, technical literature and historical materials specifically
- Writing (particularly about anything I'm interested and/or knowledgable in); also ad copywriting
- Humor (and no, I'm not going to admit to contributing to uncyclopedia here)
