Yes, I'm a geek, nerd, saddo. Call it what you will, Mike's my name and routing's my game. That would have an entirely different meaning to some people :-).
I watch Star Trek (some of the time). Eat pizza (some of the time). Drink loads of coffee (most of the time), unless I'm drinking beer. Can't stand sushi though. I babble too (noticed that?).
My life as a geek...
...started in about 1980 when my school bought a Commodore PET 3032, I got a Commodore VIC20 for Christmas around that time as well, complete with the funky RAM expansion slot thing on the back.
Moving into high school aged 11, I was then exposed to the BBC "B", "Econet" and a big, black heavy thing called a Research Machines 380Z. A year later my high school then installed a network of Research Machines "Nimbus" computers, enter MS-DOS and Windows v1.0, stage left. At 16 went to 6th Form and it was back to BBC "B"s - obviously they spent their money elsewhere...
At this point I started a part-time/weekend job with Safeway and became introduced to what would be the first network I had any proper responsibility for - an IBM EPOS network. At one point I worked with Safeway full-time and became the Instore Data Clerk - this mainly consisted of ministering to the scary Token Ring and SNA-based architecture around which the system was built, three PS/2 servers (clunky by today's standards), and the troublesome lane hardware.
By this point, we're in the early 1990's, and I go to University at Aston, in Birmingham. Re-enter Windows, this time 3.1, and the Internet. Aston had a connection to JANET, and all students had email. We had PC networks running Novell, a cluster of VAX 40/60s (VMS - DARFC!), and a Sequent box. I became bitten, and was a fully fledged nerd from this moment forward. Sparcs started to arrive, and eventually replaced all the VAXen and the Sequent. Hanging out in the labs more than I should have done, I got to know the Novell admin, a friendly overworked guy, which become handy whenever I needed a bigger disk quota (default was 5MB), without getting forms signed in triplicate :-). During this period, I got my first Intel-based machine, a 486DX2/66 with a whopping 8MB of RAM. The case and PSU of this machine lives on as part of "plate.smashing.net" today. Not long after getting the PC, I get a modem, and get an Internet account with Demon. They were the biggest, best and cheapest UK ISP around at the time (1994).
So, I leave Uni, and become a Tech Support "Bob", supporting a wide range of Doze and Mac dialup users... the worst sort. Support them, and you can probably support anything. I found that I had a natural talent for comms and IP networking, and started spreading my wings, and looking after the internal network, and wiring closets. Got exposed to SCO UNIX during this point... oh well, not everything can be perfect!
Got plenty of Cisco and Ascend exposure at Dircon, and went on to expand their network from a couple of routers and a couple of upstream providers to multiple LINX ports, dual Transatlantic connections, with routing redundancy, almost 300% more dialup ports than I started with, and more telcos than you can shake a stick at :-).
I left Dircon 1 month away from 3 years service, on 14th June 1999, to take up my position at LINX. Here I get to work with some interesting equipment, including Gigabit Ethernet switches. We're pretty much on the bleeding edge of things. We're about to expand the exchange point to a group of extra locations in the London area, and become the biggest distributed IXP in the world. I'm on the verge of becoming one of the "usual suspects", at least in the UK Internet industry!
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