I've been looking around here and I'm surprised that I haven't found such a thread. I've been reading TR for a good many years now and I've gotten to know many of the personalities that frequent this site, but I've been very curious to know more about "the man behind the moniker". Tell us all a brief background on yourself, what jobs and hobbies you have, what brings you here to TR, and overall what makes you "tick". Anyway, it's only fair that I start with myself, so here goes:
Hello everyone. I'm a 26-year-old from Rhode Island (originally from Massachusetts) and I've been in the Marine Corps since January of '07 as an air traffic control communications technician. I'm a geek and a nerd in every way those words are defined, although growing up those things weren't as "cool" as they are today. I like reading sci-fi and fantasy, riding my bike all over town, tinkering with electronics, and playing video games. I hate running and working out, even though I do it every day, and I'm always picked last when it comes to sports.
My generation was probably the first that grew up with computers in the classroom (at that time it was MS-DOS, with a few Apple IIs scattered about). My first computer was an old Tandy that ran Windows 3.1 on which I played games like The Oregon Trail and The Incredible Machine followed by a Packard Bell with Windows 95 which was my first introduction to the internet. I then moved on to a Compaq with 98 where I played around with IRC chatting and a copy of Starcraft Shareware which I fell absolutely in love with and immediately saved up to buy the complete battle chest of Starcraft Brood War. From then onward it was Blizzard games for me. I got Warcraft II Battle.net Edition and Diablo and played the hell out of those until I got Diablo 2 which is where the problems began. I couldn't run Diablo 2 on my machine which had one of the old Cyrix processors in it, so I nicked a Pentium 233 MMX from my mom's PC and swapped it for mine. Playing Diablo 2 was a breeze and forever afterward I became obsessed with PC hardware. In 2005 I graduated high school and got myself a Dell XPS gaming laptop, Warcraft III, and then World of Warcraft and I became a stranger to the world for the next 2 years aside from my brief attendance at Ohio State University the multiple dead-end jobs I had to hold just to get by.
In 2007 WoW finally lost its appeal after boot camp and I broadened my horizons for games. I had a stable income, so I started buying whatever was on the shelf. I got a copy of "The Orange Box" and was forced to install Steam. From then on it was game over. My little gaming laptop, as beefy as its 6800 Go Ultra was, didn't have the oomph or the hard drive space to play all the latest games. That's when I started going online and drooling over all the hottest hardware and gaming benchmarks and realizing that a cheap desktop could mop the floor with my $2000 laptop. It was the system guide that brought me here, and the build guide showed me just how easy it was to put it all together. I became a lurker until I finally had the guts to take the plunge and start asking questions in this forum. It was part of
this story that won me a free copy of Just Cause 2 and ever since then I've been a vocal member of this community.
While I've been here on this site I've been stationed in 3 places. I was in Pensacola, FL for over a year, Hawaii for 4 years, and now I'm in Okinawa, Japan awaiting orders to recruiter school in San Diego. Who knows where I'll be sent next, but if it's anywhere close you can bet I'll be at next year's TR BBQ.