Starting off from how I started my learning with LVNet: (rough edit just a fair warning)
Apartment circa 2000:
I would get dropped off at 9am to start out my day. I would start off doing help desk calls for dial up users. the famous “have you turn it off and back on again” calls. a tower of towers all loaded with Windows 98, Windows Me needing to be either reinstalled, power supply replaced and windows reinstalled. Harddrive failure and data restored if I could, I would use an in-house linux machine to attempt to restore data. My first month at the apartment working, I believe I’ve made over 50 computers working again reloaded with windows 98se and ME on demand if they wanted it and with my tricks with linux I was able to recover data from a few of them I don’t have a number to recount. My work horse and ethics started here, where if I was assigned something or wanted to fix something it was given to me and I’d beast it out. 3 maybe 4 times a week we would go out for an actual low voltage wiring and installation of the adsl routers and over time I learned how to program the “Cellpipes”.
I worked from Monday to Friday, some of these days I would be promised to get a ride home from Mr. M. but that time might be at 1am or 3am and ready to work at 9-10am. He would drive an 98 – 99 purple jaguar with an convertible top or would drive his roommates Pontiac 2000 firebird from time to time. Mr M would rack up alot of speeding tickets that get resolved to parking tickets to even dismissed and his driving is always mashing the pedal to the metal and gives no care about the traffic laws and exploits every moment he can get just to drive fast to get to his destination. He also suffers from sleep disorder or something that resolves him not able to sleep longer than an hour or 2 like he naps all the time, maybe gets 2 – 3 hours a night of sleep if that. The first time he drove me home, he would mash the pedal and do over 100 down Maryland parkway and would run red lights if he could.
He also had this huge lifted mid 80’s jeep that he slowly customized as the tonka jeep, and when he drove that it was scary because it was lifted with 35″ monster truck style tires. Yes, I would get super scared of his driving, because HIS driving was massively wreckless and often times if it’s late if he did sit at a light he would actually fall asleep at the wheel.
In the apartment, I also dug into tech support calls for dialup and dsl troubleshooting over the phone, alot of times it’s just as simple as “have you turn it off and back on again?” I would have to walk them through how to do that.
Mr C the CTO while Mr M was the CEO actually lived together as roommate in this apartment while operating the business. Mr M fully financed and paid Mr C. Tuition with UNLV. When I first started there Mr M was telling me how much of a dumb ass he was and when the mail server broke that he might of done it as how much he doesn’t know what he is doing and how much of a high school drop out he is and jumped into the dotcom bubble and cashed out ontop of being a huge hustler since highschool in L.A. He opened a company in Las Vegas to cash in on the custom IBM and quick computer repair business that fell apart around 1998. Which later on speculate as a rumor around another shady business deal that involved with FBI agents but I am not sure as it was just a rumor. I am 1 year older than the CTO Mr C. In which from day one Mr C seemed to warm up to me as he rarely does to anyone else in believe that he knew it was me that totally compromised his network but never said a word I just believe that is why he trusted me with alot of his network and server administrations from the start including administrative rights and so on.
First office:
Freemont office Partner Connecting Point, mid to late 2000.
The addon to the old Bank of America building, where the bank vault was turned into an unlockable bank vault door for a future co-location facilitiy.
When we moved in my first place was a cubical that I would site and work for 16 hour days just answering phones, building computers, fixing computers, building servers and host my own server and such. under my desk I had 5 static ip’s open and unfiltered used for IRCd, web and piracy. They gave me the current clients that use windows servers that result in windows nt 4 and newly added windows 2000 server. (quick fact, you could totally enable windows 200 server as a desktop and ran a whole lot better than the win2k workstation it was a bad practice but this was my workstation and testing grounds for myself) and with building win2k servers for co-located clients because of piracy I had copies that wasn’t legit because all they did use them was for IIS and I had to also secure them in the process including disabling RPC, installed 3rd party software for anti-virus and firewalling like my favorite at the time was “BlackIce Defender” Daily i started to keep a list of windows servers for co-lo clients and constantly verify and make sure there is no issues from there on and once a month apply patches and service packs if available. I tried to keep a top notch on security when I got handled this opporunity.
I got to pick up alot of graphic design and html, coldfusion, asp, perl, and php+mysql knowledge and the new logo was born and new website launched make it all on php and the design was created with 3d studio max for the 3d cat5 cable and adobe photoshop and macromedia fireworks, with that I started to take on alot of his clients website design and learned how todo do SEO (search engine optimization).
Connecting point wanted to start using the cubicles for sales, so I was relocated into what they call the boiler room next to the vault which for me was a good place as I could run in really fast and reboot servers but after a month or 2 I was relocated upstairs due to I was being accused of stealing hardware. (how could I? I was there 16 hours a day basically living at the job only going home to shower and change clothing at this point) . I did get weekends off but you know what I didn’t mind it much, during the summer time my house had only a swamp cooler and never worked in the heat of the 110-120F weather.
Moving around in connecting point for me nothing really changed, just I pretty much, I did lug my home computer with me from home to work just so I can play video games on one screen and work on another. Because I work there I rarely ate lunch, breakfast, and most of the times I did get dinner from denny’s next door or would order a pizza if it was allowed. But I had a company credit card given to me just for that and 9/10 I would be cool but there would be days where I would have to wait as the card would be denied and I never had cash on me because I never got a paycheck and would wait hours at denny’s just for Mr.M to show up with cash to pay for my dinner.
I never got a paycheck because I would get a lecture about if I got a paycheck I would spend it all on useless crap or give it all to my mom giving me the feeling that he had no faith in to letting me be me and it always felt like he doing that was controlling me and how I want things in life. But when I would question how much am I making, he would make up numbers on the fly and do a scenario if I did pay you, it would be this and this would be how much you would get. etc…etc… but he would dodge any questions I would ask in relation to a paycheck or becoming a real employee. There was a time that came to a point as the success is showing the business is growing that I would promised and rewarded a partner status. In the end ignorance got the better of me, I should have known better but I also didn’t know my own self worth of what I was becoming into.
Part 2,
More of the memories that I remember being there as 9/11 happened, the plan to join the airforce after all, cancer, car accidents that lead me to a big paycheck but Mr.M stole that paycheck from me. Angry blogs, a hooker, mentally and verbal abused and pushed around. Being trolled on a death bed, Wardriving.