Binary Revolution Forums: Alive. - Binary Revolution Forums

I've learned a lot this past year, but one thing I've learned is more important to my life than anything else. I just wanted to share.

Growing up, I was a normal kid for the most part. I did good in school and excelled in Science and History. I was a popular kid, was always a trend setter, and dominated the "cool group". I was very athletic, and played any and every sport that I could. Growing up, my father worked for a major oil corporation, and I had some experience with Windows 3.1, but I mostly used DOS. I learned some basic DOS commands to be able to play games off of floppy discs, and access DOS from the Norton OS the school had installed. I thought it was so cool to load up this crazy program that wasn't fun at all called "win95". http://www.binrev.co...ark/laugh.gifIn third grade, I got to really experience a GUI for the first time. I learned very quickly the computer basics, and by the end of that year, I was helping teachers in the elementary school with their computers.

Some events in my school occurred and in forth grade, and I became less interested in sports and school and became more intrigued by computers. My father decided it was time to set up shop at the house, and get a computer so that he could work from home. I remember he wanted something "fast, and Y2K-compliant." We got our computer and I was enjoying how nice Windows 98 was! Then we got AOL...that changed everything for me. The Internet was so much more than the AOL walled garden I first new from when I was at my father's office. I could find all kinds of cool things to do and information my parents didn't want me to know, and I learned a lot more about computers.

So, I became obsessed with the Internet. I learned HTML and had my first website at the same time. It was a Scooby-Doo fan page and I think it was quite possibly the equivalent of your run of the mill Myspace page today- infected with lots of stupid gifs. But hey, I was a kid an I was learning this all for the first time. I learned more and more about creating websites, and would look at the source code of sites I thought were cool to try to learn how they managed to do what they did on their site. I quit sports, started doing bad in school, and continued my life on the Internet. I was still highly sociable, though. I was the popular kid I always was and this continued when I switched schools in the 6th grade. It wasn't until I moved to Louisiana, in an inter-city school where I was a white kid who was a minority, that my social life changed. That wasn't easy for me to deal with, not because of the race, but because of the culture shock from living in a rural area all your life to the freaking ghetto in the South.

These kids were awful, and I had no real way of relating to them at all. I didn't like hip hop/rap, I had no desire in being a thug, and my intellect was waaay higher than their's. To make matters worse, the school was a horrible, under-funded, old school with no computers. I wasn't accepted into the sports programs, and I had no real way of fitting in, despite my attempts at trying to be friends with every clique there. This gave me more time to learn about this thing called phone phreaking. I was totally immersed in phone hacking at the time and had some fun learning these techniques. At the same time, I was shop lifting regularly, and stole cigarettes off of people's porches in the apartment complex I lived in and sold them to the kids on the other side of the river for $10/pack. I kept living like this until I became a freshman in highschool, when my parents and I moved to a nice neighborhood and I had an awesome school to go to.

Being in high school was so much fun for me, because it gave me a new way of exploiting- social engineering and life hacking. This is when I developed the hacker mindset in my lfie. I came up with all kinds of dumb stuff, like a fake "VIP Pass" that aided me in social engineering the teachers into letting me go into parts of the school I wasn't allowed. I even joined a drug rehab group to get out of class. I learned so much about social interaction and how gullible people can be, now that I had an alternate mindset. The end result of this, was being expelled. I won't go into details, but I was denied certain rights I was supposed to have, and was forced to fail that year of school. This gave me a 7 month vacation!! I was living the life- wake up in the morning, eat a hot pocket, play Starseige: Tribes all morning, eat wings for lunch, game some more, lurk the PLA forums, eat, and go to sleep. I had no friends from high school who visited me. I only knew one kid around my age, and befriended him and his dad. His dad and I would work on projects together... he had a nice shop and I had the computer knowledge, we made a good team. Other than this, my life was entirely Internet-based.

My parents tried to get me out, forced me to church, but none of it worked. I was very content with my life. I had friends online whom I would speak with all the time, and they tended to be smarter than the people my age IRL. I liked the fact that I could have conversations with people all over the world while doing other things, like playing video games. Voice bridges, VoIP conferences, I loved it. I could remain social and be in front of the most logical piece of my life- the computer. When I moved again, I made two IRL friends who really opened my RL social life. I found it very awkward for the first couple of years to be on the same level as "normal" people. My sense of humor was based off of Internet and gamer humor. Calling someone a "noob" back then was something none of these normal people understood. I found myself years behind these high schools kids from this preppy-Catholic school when it came to social skills. I did the best I could, and although I was a popular kid just like I used to be as a kid, I wasn't a confident with myself like I used to be anymore.

High school ended, I had a decent time, and used my computer skills to aid in my passing, if you catch my drift. I decided to not go to college, since I hated school and would rather work at the place I was working anyways. I moved out of my parents house and was the first out of my group of IRL friends to live in the city. I found my place again. I went out, partied, made lots of friends, and had a cool place. I left the hacking scene completely and didn't do anything to further my knowledge at this time. I just did something I really hadn't done in years- live. I thought that it was stupid for me to have been caught up on computers all those years and I should have been living this life all along. Time passed, and all of my group of friends made it to the city. I was the center of the party, I had all the contacts, had all the friends, and was one crazy motherfucker.

It seemed that at the peak of this IRL social life, I met this amazing girl. I fell in love and there went all the logic that was left! My job forced me to move back to the rural setting I had as a kid, and I found myself desperately trying to keep from that. Well, I couldn't change a thing and I was stuck in the same situation I had as a teen. Alone, looking at a computer screen, reading my old hacking documents. I realized that I missed out on a lot of breakthroughs in security/insecurity, and couldn't find a lot of the people I used to keep in contact with, or their sites that used to be popular. That's when I realized that I needed to do something to make sure that didn't happen again, so I created Area51 Archives. That kept me going for a little while, but I was depressed that I was away from the girl who I was missing more than the life I had in Louisiana. She visited me in February, and I knew that I was going to either a)lose her or b)lose myself if I didn't move her here. I got everything ready to move her here, went to Louisiana, met her family, and asked her to marry me, and she moved here with me the next day.

Having a fiancé hasn't been the easiest experience in my life. It's a lot to take in, and I'm happy I have this experience with her. We're good for each other, and as complex as it can be sometimes to have a relationship with her, it's always the simple things that make us both happy. I've learned a lot this year, though. My teenage years were filled with late nights staring at a computer screen, just like they are now. The difference is, I can also balance a social life. I learned the social skills necessary to not only manipulate people, but to enjoy them as well. I am interested to see what my future will be. I see a happy balance for the future, when it comes to myself remaining involved in hacking culture and also living a "normal" life. It's been a crazy journey, but I guess that's what we call being alive.