Back in 1984 I was in grade 8 & my mom bought a computer ( VIC 20 ). Only 3 kids in my school had one!!! Man I was lucky. The best thing was that I did not spend all my money at the arcade anymore. You had to enter commands ( aka 'code' ) to get things to happen. So I quickly learned to program so I could get my games to work. When I got a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive I felt like the king because I could now add more games. I designed a car racing game but after a few corners on the race track the VIC 20 ran out of memory and I had to stop. I worked around this & made a simple boxing game ( stick people made out of boxes and lines - but you could throw & block punches ).So I have had an early passion in computers and programming. When I got to university I decided I liked Physics best out of all my high school classes so I took it as my major. I really got excited about learning Einstein's theories, Quantum Mechanics, Kaos theory & Fractal Dimensional Analysis. At this time I also studied Digital Design ( how logic gates and circuitry actually work ). My first real IT Job was at Microsoft Canada in May 1998. I was hired with 10 other temporary employees to help handle Windows 98 support calls. As time passed I added products along the way - DOS, Windows 3.1, & 95. I was hired full time, the only one out of the 10 original temps!!! I felt really lucky, enjoyed what I did and liked hanging around with people who liked computers ( they were not in style back then ). As the months and years passed I began to get training on the operating systems as they came out - Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP. We also supported server products as well such as Small Business Server 4.5, 2000 & 2003. This suite of products did so much I was really impressed - email, internal web site, file storage, etc. This is where I really found my passion - setting up and managing corporate IT infrastructures. I wrote a few KB articles while at Microsoft ( see below ).