Hacker Perspective: alias3d

There's a game going on that only people like you and me can see and understand.  It's why we read 2600.  The game demands that you remain curious.  We know the score while others, well, don't.  We know there's always a way over or under the fence.  And eventually a calf path will present itself if we just keep hacking.

It's a sickness, really.  One that's cost me jobs, friends, my own sanity, and countless hours missed out on raising my children.  Many of my early memories playing this game are of me being in some form of trouble and always for the same reason: I was curious.

If you could feel all the smacks upside my head my mother gave me growing up, you'd lean slightly to the left too.

There was the time I put magnets on the tube television in the living room, warping the picture.  Smack!  The time I froze the secretary's computer when dicking around with a paint program at my parent's insurance company.  Smack!

Lucky for me, dad was the complete opposite.  He encouraged (still does!) curiosity.  He was a Harley mechanic up until he went blind.  He's retired now and fixes bikes by ear.

Double lucky for me, my parents split when I was young.  That insurance company I mentioned is owned by my stepfather.  He was much like my mother (still is!) in the sense that curiosity kills the kid.

My dad encouraged tearing into things to better understand them.  Though no inanimate object was without feelings.  You pet the dashboard of the car at the end of a successful trip.  Good car.  Thank you.

The divorce eventually left me living with my father.  His newfound blindness forced him to start his life over.  So there he was, back in school to become a social worker.  A single father whose vision was now like looking through a jar of Vaseline, responsible for his chubby nerd of a son, and he kicked ass (still does!).

In the mid-1990s, there was a sudden tidal wave of assistive technology that filled our apartment.  And all of it talked.

The place was bursting at the seams with talking: thermostats, clocks, pocket contact organizers, wrist watches, calculators, and at the center of it all was JAWS on the main PC in the dining room reading off scans of dad's college textbooks at a rate so fast it would make a sighted person's brain bleed if any attempt was made to keep up.

Being under the impression that technology had a soul of some kind and all of a sudden stuff is talking at you has a big impact on a kid.

This time the tech warped me and my perceptions.  Computers are your friends.  They help get you out of jams.  They help you express yourself.

I've had plenty of traditional exploits growing up that involved technology.  Like using dad's scanner to dupe and forge notes to get out of gym, or scan my textbooks to OCR for faster copying and pasting into book reports.  The removal of Bess from school computers so we could Google [Cindy Margolis].  TV-B-Gones in the classroom.  Getting the payphones outside the food mart to do my bidding.  Remember Tellme?  And many, many trips to RadioShack after school with friends to ogle new gear.

In school, a friend and I teamed up to help our area's aging population fix their computers, install printers, stuff like that.  It was good.  We even made a couple bucks.  My friend now is actually a successful dude in the tech industry with a beautiful family.  Hi, Steve!

After dad finished college, he began a recycling program that put computers in the hands of the elderly.  It was him who got us our gigs.

He also provided education, too, to help stave off the alienation a beige obelisk with a monitor and peripherals can bring when it suddenly lands in your living room and you have no clue how to use it.

That time of helping others was short, though.  Then came girls.  Dating.  Sex.  And video.

My last two years of high school were spent absorbed in a video production program where a small group of us worked throughout the year on a documentary.  I first learned how to edit video on two VCRs and then the ever popular Casablanca non-linear video editing system.

It wasn't until I got a job almost a year after high school at a small television station as a technical director that the hacker within was reawakened.  Babysitting over a dozen computers at once will do that to you.

By that time, I had married my goth high school sweetheart.  We married young (still together!).  Hi, hun!

Being a TD (technical director?) was great.  I often miss the hum of the rack room and the constant 64 degrees of master control.

The TV station was the perfect learning environment.  I've dropped out of college so many times that when people ask where I went to school, I just give them the station's call letters.  So many fires needed putting out and fast because black on air meant no dough in the station's pocket and a very angry general manager.

It was a tiny itsy-bitsy station, so most of the tech was ancient or automated or you only had the Fisher-Price version of what you really needed.  What I mean by that is the ParkerVision automated production system.  What a POS.

The general manager heard I was dorking with news graphics and gave me the opportunity to create a new graphics package.  Finally!  A shot to be creative on a computer in a smack free environment!

The station had early copies of the Adobe Creative Suite, which no one really knew how to use aside from the basics of Premiere.  Half of commercial production functioned on a DPS.  One guy was still putting stills on green to key!  I introduced him to the alpha channel.

I spent two weeks glued to After Effects in between directing live news, running program breaks, and ingesting video.

After handing in my graphics, I kept learning.  I started taking copious amounts of notes from various online tutorial sites.  My composition notebook was like a book of spells and I was the only wizard in town.

I was such a fan of After Effects I went to get my certification at a facility just a town over and failed spectacularly.  But that didn't deter my creative efforts.

Then came the day a friend in production asked if I'd ever heard of Blender, the 3D suite.  I shook my head, he loaded up blender.org, and there was Big Buck Bunny.  The rest was history.

You mean to tell me I can be creative on a computer until I puke and I don't have to spend a damn dime?!  I was in heaven.

It took me a month to create my first animation - which was a donut rolling and crashing against a mug full of coffee.  We used it as a Tim Hortons' promo.  Soon came a series of great opportunities.

I climbed the very, very small (step) ladder there and went from TD to production to production manager to creative director.  I managed master control for a period and continued designing graphics for the news department.  I also created the station's first in-house digital department that handled the station's website and web ad creation.  Along with all that, I was on call to swoop in and put out fires in the rack room.

I learned broadcast engineering from a Marine and an Air Force engineer.  I highly value everything they taught me and my time working with them.  Even the times when we didn't get along.

Early on, in an effort to ease the tension of me being the new guy in the sandbox, I occasionally just happened to have the Marine's favorite candy on hand to share and he eventually associated me with something good.  An early experiment in social engineering.

I actually got my chance to solder for the first time five minutes before we went live on air with the evening news.  Up to that point, I had only watched the chief engineer's assistant solder, so I had to go by memory and luckily repaired the evening anchor's IFB at the last second.

There was one lesson I wish I would have learned from them, but unfortunately I did not.  And that was that sometimes people in power want to use you to save a buck.  Please forgive me, guys.  I was an idiot.

For a brief moment, I was what the owner's wife called "untapped potential."  One home run after another went to my head.  They eventually let other people go, including the other engineers, leaving me solely responsible and virtually surgically attached to the station.  I blame myself.  I should have said no.

Eventually, the stack of hats atop my head was too much weight for me to bear and almost crushed me.  I thought I could handle all the questions.  Can you install this?  Can you fix this?  Can you build this?  Can you do this without spending too much money?  Sure.  Yes.  Of course!

I didn't realize I was just people-pleasing.  Too afraid to say no.  I was young and, although I could solve most problems on my own, very stupid (still can be sometimes!).

I spent nights at the TV station massaging keyboards rather than being home with my wife and newborn son.  For about the first two years of my son's life, I was "too busy."

One day, the sales manager tasked me to infiltrate a gathering a local competitor had put together for potential customers.  The competitor was pitching locally made websites.  "You know how to do all that digital stuff.  Go see how much they're charging so we can do the same!"

My James Bond moment led to me working for the competitor several months later.  I was the only one in the audience that day asking serious questions and that caught the general manager's attention.  She stopped me on my way out, gave me her business card, and asked to meet me again sometime.

I'd like to say that new job led to many fulfilling years of hacking at a radio station, learning incredible new things from their engineer (who happened to be blind by the way), and afforded me plenty of time to spend with my family, but I was fired a year later.

I grew the radio station's digital side 800 percent within the first six months.  Exceeded quarterly goals.  But, as what happened to most folks that worked there, I was fired for rubbing the GM the wrong way after I said no to a request for the first time.

I made an attempt to get my old job back, but was denied.

On my last day at the TV station the year prior, the owner's wife sent me an email that just said, "Hope the grass is truly greener..."

Well, Mrs. K, I'm sorry to say it wasn't.

After being let go from the radio station, I decided to go back to school to learn to write.  My real passion is storytelling (how am I doing?).

For a brief moment at the TV station, I thought I had a future in 3D animation.  Which led me to fall in love with Blender, Linux, open-source, all that stuff.

Each time the TV station would toss a PC, that sucker would wind up in my homegrown render farm heating my basement and sending my electric bill beyond the ionosphere.

My love for Blender hasn't faded and we still find time to do fun things now and then.

While back in school for the umpteenth time, just for fun and to stretch my creative muscles, I held a free summer camp where I invited kids to come hack with Blender for a week at the college I was attending.  They let me use their Mac lab for free and even gave me administrative access.  How nice!

On the final day of my Blender course, my wife gave birth to our second son.  She actually went into labor while I was teaching!

Don't worry, I finished instructing the course first and then went to the hospital.  I mean, this wasn't our first rodeo.  At that point, that was our third kid.  Did I mention I have a daughter?  She's wicked cool.

Before making my way up that little ladder, my shift at the TV station was at three in the morning directing live news and scraping ice off of satellite dishes until noon.  Afternoons were for spending time with my little girl.  I screwed things up with my son when other people realized I was good with computers.

The third time around, I've made sure to spend almost every moment I can with my latest addition - while constantly trying to repair any damage my being "too busy" had caused with any and all relationships, especially with my first boy.

I still haven't finished college yet.  I actually landed a job with a publishing company just as I was entering my final year, which afforded me the opportunity to work from home writing for local and state publications - all while my newborn son slept on my chest.

I've had a couple of jaunts teaching digital art and Blender to young kiddos at a local art center.  That experience helped get me a job for about a year teaching middle schoolers how to 3D print, use a laser cutter, solder, do basic circuitry, video production, all things I enjoy.

Toward the end of my first year of teaching I lost a student to suicide.  He was a victim of cyberbullying.

Losing him hit hard.

Years earlier, at the height of my career at the TV station, I was under so much stress I checked myself into a psych ward for a short time.  I thought I was done with living.

After losing my student, the world stopped and I took the time to ask myself what I really wanted out of life.

Social media seriously harms your mental health.  Especially children.

So, for the past year, I haven't played the game I mentioned earlier as much.  I've kept my curiosity to a minimum when it comes to troubleshooting.  Instead, I've spent more time with my kids and more time writing than I ever have.

As fate would have it, while writing this, my dad has requested I track down the former owner of the now long gone local RadioShack and talk to him about installing a digital antenna at dad's place so he can listen to the local TV station or, as I like to say, my alma mater.

alias3d is currently writing and drawing a sci-fi comic anthology (just finished inking the first four pages!).  In his spare time he enjoys exercising with his wife and son - he's lost 55 pounds over the past six months!