This is my story. It's a fluke. A mistake. I should be dead.

I was born to an aerospace engineer turned IT engineer dad, and a childhood speech pathologist mother. (You can stop here it explains everything)

I was both great and terrible at school. A perfect archetype of, "If they just applied themselves they would be great."

As a side-job, my father in the early 2000s ran a webhosting firm out of our 1800sqft home. So I grew up with a T1 line. Which is both insane and completely fucked. I had my own website built with Microsoft Frontpage – in elementary school. It was pages of high-resolution pictures of animals I found. Because bandwidth meant nothing to me.

In middle school, was was recruited to redesign the school's website, pulled out of class weekly to use the Vice-Principal's MacBook to use Dreamweaver. I cleanly reimplemented and honed the existing design, and made my own additions. I used Photoshop healing brush to remove concrete gum stains on all the photos to make it look more appealing. This took a very long time. The site is still on Internet Archive.

In high school I was allowed the "elective" class period to simply be the IT Guy's assistant. I helped administer a fleet of the first generation of OSX eMacs, with files hosted on a Windows server.

This was when I first discovered plugging an Ethernet hub into itself would bring the whole network down. (Sorry Adrian)

Part 1