Hi everyone,

This is Scott, the omnious and loudmouth voice from the podcast. Firstly, I hope you are enjoying the podcast as much as we are making it. No, really, we have lots of fun with this. It's like a party every Thursday morning. I even spike my coffee with a little Irish seasoning from time to time. Can you tell?

Anyway, just so you get a little bit more information about who I am, I was born here in the Boston area and have spent almost all my life here. I started out on the computer at eight years old. My first program I wrote was the "Atari Light Show". Of course, I didn't really write it, but copied it in from a book. Yet, when I ran that first program for the first time, I was awestruck at the brillant array of screens that displayed lines and patterns of colors. Holy crap, did I really just do that? I was amazed at what less than 10 lines of source code could do. I did the natural thing any 8 year old boy would do; I started hacking it.

After I was about 12 years old, I would pick up hobbies with electronics, audio engineering, along with the computer stuff. At 16, I inherited my first laptop, with a screen of eighty colums by eight - yes, eight - rows! It was a monochrome LCD screen, similar to digital watches of the time, but ran CP/M, Basic, and Wordstar, all from roms. It also had this other strange device, a 300 baud modem that I could plug into the phone jack and dial into builletin board systems, a sort of "pre-world wide web" for the online world. I would run my sisters phone bill up to $600 chatting on the Argus BBS in just a few months.

It wasn't until the 8088's were finally affordable (to me, that was in the few hundred dollar rage) and Ultima 6 came out that I would focus on computers themselves more intensely. I was always running off of some cobbled system that was always opened up and barely running. But those fundamental lessons of doing it myself, solving problems, and hacking until it was fixed ultimately matured into a career.

In 1995, the world wide web came to America Online and even though I had been accessing the internet back in 1992, this was still new to me. I created my first website after seeing someone claim a demo from the new Metallica album due out, "Load", was available on his website. I downloaded it and listened. It was a live performance of one of the songs, not a demo. So, I thought to myself, I'll show the world what real Metallica demos sound like! You see, I had a collection of rare and hard to find studio demos from the band that I knew the rest of the world was dying to hear.

And how right I was. I should have known there wa s a problem when I got a call from my ISP, the infamous TIAC based in Bedford, MA, stating I had a large bill to pay of over one thousand dollars. What for? Bandwidth usage. The funny thing about it was the staff at TIAC were pretty shocked when they asked me what kind of website I had, for I was the second most accessed website out of the twenty thousand they were hosting. They were surprised because all other nine in the top ten most popular sites were porn sites! It was the audio files I was making available in the archaic Microsoft WAV format that was doing it. I guess you could say I pioneered file sharing, exclusively of the band that eventually testified before congress to eliminate the practice (Napster affair)!

This eventually led me to work for a systems integrator building systems, then as a systems administrator where I learned all about UNIX; then moved on to managing more UNIX systems--then web systems. Throughout this time I have provided technology services for companies such as Kronos (the time-card people), Bitstream, Inc., Houghton Miffilin, IDG Publications (ITworld.com, Linuxworld, Sunworld, Javaworld), MFS Investment Management, ESPN, NBC/Universal, BJ's Wholesale and yes--many others.

Thanks again for listening, please stick with us there's a lot more to learn!