My Past Interest In Computers

1986:

At the age of 7 I used a computer for the first time in my life this was a computer that belonged to our school principal and I used it to write a letter at school, the computer was an Amstrad. From when I first saw a computer this was something I really had a love for, back then it was just seeing a device with so many button to press interested me because I also used to like using a typewriter as well not as much as a computer though. This same year I went to Health Camp in Roxburgh and remember playing on a Commodore 64 there, didn't like this computer as much because all the games used a joystick so not so many buttons to push.

1988:

After our school principal left in 1987 he took his computer with him and the school once again had no computer until the school bought it's first computer this year. The computer was a BBC Micro computer, we used this computer mostly to type up our creative writing stories using a programme called Folio. The computer also had lots of games like I remember a floppy full of about 30 games.

1989:

For Christmas my parents bought me and my sister an Atari 2600, well not really. This games console was a clone of an Atari 2600, it had 64 built in games, could play Atari cartridges and even looked like the early versions of the 2600 but not with the wood panels found in this model.

1991:

I started Form 1 at Menzies College in Wyndham, the school then had a computer room with 15 BBC Computers all networked to an Econet File Server. Every Tuesday boys in Form 1 and 2 were allowed to use the computer room at lunchtime and I certainly was there every Tuesday. I learnt how to program in BBC basic but only very small programs.

1992:

I used a PC for the first time when my friend Terry was given his own laptop, I can remember playing games in DOS like Test Drive, California Games, Alley Cat, Jones in the Fast Lane and Commander Keen to name a few. I really wanted my own computer now but since getting my own at the age of 13 was a little of our my price range I bought a Sega Master System with my pocket money.

1994:

A year after buying a Sega Master System I now really wanted to move up to a Mega Drive, my friend Jonothan had one with a Master System Converter. Mum wouldn't let me spend my money on one and was never really happy about the idea of me buying Master System in the first place, would of rathered me stick with the old Atari. Anyhow since I wasn't allowed a Mega Drive my next idea was to get an Amiga. My parents were happy with that idea as I could use it for school work and use my 14" TV as a monitor. My parents actually bought me an Amiga 500 for my 15th birthday, my Amiga 500 was the very last model on display at Dick Smiths and for a very reduced price. My memories of the Amiga are how slow it was to load everything from floppy and trying to play Mortal Kombat switching all 3 floppy disks. I bought a colour dot matrix printer that was very noisey and used to take sometimes 20 minutes to print a colour graphic page. That same year my parents bought me a second hand Amiga monitor for Christmas since the picture quality using a TV wasn't that great.

1995:

A year after buying the Amiga I had so many problems with it I decided it was time to ditch this computer. The problems included my lack of software a virus infecting almost every disk and the fact Commodore was no longer in business meant getting software was so much harder. So I decided I should sell the Amiga and use the money to buy a PC. Instead of this happening my parents bought their own computer. My parents computer was a 486DX4-100 it had 8MB of RAM, Windows 3.11 and a 4x Speed CD-ROM and 16bit Sound Card. Back then a sound card and CD-ROM were luxury items. My high school also ditched their BBC network this year and creating a network of 12 PCs connected to a NetWare file server. The computers all booted into DOS and after a user logged in a shared copy of Windows 3.11 was loaded from the server.

1996:

Form 6 at school and my first choice of subjects was Computer Studies. At Menzies Form 1 and 2 students did Computer Studies but after that there was no Computer Studies until Form 6. This year I used the Internet for the first time, at school we had the net available for use on one PC, our connection was a 14.4k Dial-up connection and cost the school a toll call to Invercargill every time someone used the net. Students access was restricted with the classroom where the Internet computer was located only unlocked when a teacher was there. I also learnt how to make HTML webpages despite having used very little of the net back then. At the end of the year I came up as top student for my Computer Studies class but the way Sixth Form Certificate works my grade was only a Grade 5 even though I was getting over 80% in the exams. The reason is Sixth Form Certificate grades were allocated based on students School Cert grades. An average of 80% should have got me a grade 3 but as there were no grade 3s to allocate I got grade 5. The higher grades were always given to English, Maths and Science first.

1997:

Seventh Form at school and this year Computer Studies did not count towards University Entrance or Bursary bit since I had no intentions of going to Uni I was happy to take this subject. We spent most of our class time playing Doom, even after the school principal banned the game from the school network. Up until here my plans were when I left school I wanted to get into retail and work at an electronics store like Dick Smiths or Noel Leemings as I had a real love for electronics such as TVs and obviously computers and I figured I would make a good salesman. My computer studies teacher had other ideas he thought I should go to University and do a Computer Science degree. Uni felt too much out of my league especially since I hadn't picked the right subjects to even get University Entrance so I decided that when I left school I would go to Polytech and do a Certificate in Business Computing. At the end of the year I went to the USA and Canada and had a chance to see the Microsoft Campus in Seattle. I visited the Microsoft Museum and remember seeing a row of computers runnning each version of Windows from Windows 1.0 to Windows 95 (the latest at the time).

1998:

Started studying at Southland Polytechnic in Invercargill doing a Certificate in Business Computing. I needed 18 modules to gain my certificate this year but came short by 4. The 4 modules I missed were mostly programming something I struggled with back then. This year I bought my very own PC, my first computer was a second hand Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM, 840MB Hard Disc and ran Windows 95. By the end of the year that same PC had almost every component upgraded and was a AMD-K6-2 300 with 64MB RAM, 4GB Hard Disc and Windows 98, still the same computer since it was in the old case and had the same keyboard and monitor.

1999:

Started working part time at BP since I decided I needed something in my life that wasn't to do with computers. Most of the people in my class only talked about computers all day and had no social lives. This year at course I completed the Certificate in Business Computing and went on to do the Diploma in Business Computing. I choose to only take 16 modules and passed all but one, the one I missed was Jade. I didn't really like Jade that much not a very nice language and my tutor wouldn't let me pull out of the class and take another module.

2000:

Started the year on track to complete my Diploma in Business Computing but as I was part time I had to work or otherwise have no income. So I worked 30 hours a week at BP and studied, work did get in the way when tutors kept changing the timetable every few weeks so I was missing classes due to work. My rostered hours at BP were evenings and weekends but sometimes classes would finish after I was due to start work so I missed those classes. I came short of passing the course by 1 paper that paper was once again Jade, I was doing OK in Jade until we had a change of tutor.

2001:

With one paper to go to finish course I chose a paper that wasn't Jade and ended up getting a Merit in that class (databases in Access) and finishing the course.

2002:

This year started with me asking myself what to do now that I had graduated. I was considering moving to Christchurch to find work up there. I was actually offered a computing job in Queenstown but the problem was finding somewhere to live up there. I moved into a flat with my mate Jeff who was prevously on my course, Jeff was one of the top students and carried on to do a Bachelor of Information Technology in Dunedin and was now tutoring our course. Most jobs I applied for in Invercargill in 2002 I was told I need to get myself a Degree now that SIT were offering the Bachelor of Information Technology, big problem was a bad move I made during the middle of 2002. During this year I was stupid to buy a new car one I wish I had never bought in the first place, problem was I couldn't afford to give up work to go back and studying when I was paying this car off. This year was the year I had ADSL for the first time when our flat had it connected, we had a 128k connection with a 10GB data limit. I can remember saying how I could now chat faster on MSN or ICQ.

2003:

With me being thrown into a hole after making a big mistake buying a new car in 2002 the only way forward I could see was to increase my income so I could pay this car off and then reduce my hours at work and start studying again. To do this I moved onto graveyard shift at BP and as a result the boss was prepared to pay more for this shift. Towards the end of the year I was starting to think it was time to move on from BP and do something else, this was prompted by the boss trying to force me to work Christmas and New Years that year. Then our boss left and the new boss was even worse while he was prepared to give me the time off conditions this boss started making some pretty radical changes to our workplaces which forced everyone to want to leave. Since finding work with computers had become near on impossible I, myself and several of my workmates all went to the freezing works.

2004:

I started working at the Freezing Works at the end of 2003 and well I have to say all the stories you hear about how much everyone makes are really just stories, with us not being paid over the Christmas break, a month of not working Tuesday and an early finish to the season I was not much better off than I would have been from staying at BP. After not being able to pay off my car I ended up working at BP for the off season, this time on regular hours instead of graveyard shift and I returned to the works the next season.

2005:

On the 23rd December 2004 I was diagnosed with cancer and this has affected just about everything in my life. The computer is now probably the best thing for me to take my mind off the cancer. After starting treatment I was forced to move back in with my parents as I am no longer capable of doing simple things such as cooking myself a meal or keeping the house tidy. My parents bought themselves a laptop that I can use while in hospital, I found the laptop was also great at home where I can sit in the lazyboy during the evenings with the laptop and surf the web while watching TV. I still use my desktop heaps mainly for doing things that it is not possible to do on the laptop like play games. I seemed to spend many hours playing The Sims 2 or SimCity 4, other favourites have been GTA San Andreas and Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2. Leaving my flat I had to give up the 2mb ADSL connection and for the first 5 months at my parents all I had was dial-up. I had no problems convincing my parents to upgrade to ADSL but we had problems getting it connected to our line as Telecom were telling us the line is incompatable and were not preparted to upgrade it. Telecom are prepared to provide ADSL to Stewart Island but not to a popular suburb in Invercargill. Fortunately ADSL suddenly started working on our line, about two weeks before Woosh completed their new tower. Our Internet connection was then 256k and this seemed to be fine for me, we only had a 1GB cap and I went way over this just about every month and only had the speed reduced once.
I have now got into making movies using Windows Movie Maker, I have put together various clips and music videos of some of the best times I had in my flat in 2004 as well I have helped my friend Matt with some of the videos he has made about his Derby Car.
This website finally serves more of a purpose than what is has in the past, I have written a diary of my treatment in the hope that others with cancer or who know someone with cancer will read my diary and get an idea of what a cancer patient goes through. As you can see the computer has certainly been an excellent tool to help me through my treatment, the doctor who did my surgery even told me to get onto my computer or PlayStation as much as I can after my operation as therapy to get my arm back into action, best advice I have had from any of the doctors. I don\'t spend much time researching about my treatment, my mother does most of this instead, for me using the computer is my escape from the reality of the treatment.

2006 - 2008:

While going through treatment I didn't think I would ever be able to return to my job at the Freezing Works and was considering other options such as getting back into the computing industry. The Oncology Counsellor was going to try and set me up some work experience in the IT department at the hospital but with no luck instead the department layed off 5 staff. The counsellor then wanted to try and get me into accounting something I was not interested in. I decided to go back to the works anyhow even though this is not what the doctors wanted and handled working there fine. I was going to consider studying in the off season but our seasons were now 9 months long so not many options for those 3 months apart from working part time at BP. For the next 3 years this combination worked fine I was making good money between the two jobs.

2009:

Changes in the meat industry meant once again seasons at work ended up being cut short now back to 6 months, as it was in 2008 my off season was 5 months long and to add to to that I struggled to get much work at BP that year, a bit different to 2006 and 2007 when I was doing 50 hour weeks. So this year the thought of going back to BP for 6 months was enough to motivate me to go back and study computers. After approaching my old tutor I was able to go back to Polytech and do a Bacheolor of Information Technology and since I have a Diploma in Business Computing I was able to go straight to the second year. One of the papers I enjoyed was the Project Management paper not so much the project side I just enjoyed doing a project for a sponsor which in my case was developing a website for Southern Pride Lions. I found myself spending some late nights building this website. Overall I was pleased with the result passing all 4 papers with an A in Systems Architecture and B's in Project Management, Game Development and Object Orientated Databases. The Database paper was another Jade paper which I struggled with 10 years ago but this time managed to pass fine. Jade is a language that isn't that easy to learn or understand at first but I found I got to like in the end.
Going into 2010 I will be doing a full year with the 3rd Year Project but this is the only paper I will take in the first half of the year as I intend to continue working in my job at the Freezing Works as well.