it was like yesterday but seems so long ago

Youngstown

years ago, the HR guys bring this kid, maybe 13, into the IT department, introduces him and tells everyone he's there for the summer.
Great! I think, I get to babysit all summer. while I'm sitting there stewing about it, we'ee also talking about this pesky virus that keeps popping back up, what the hell was that virus, melissa? I think so. any rate Steve pops up and exclaims, "just point the default word template to a file on the file server!"
needless to say for about 2 minutes solid you could hear a pin drop as everyone stared slackjawed at him, then we snapped out of it, everyone rushed to a PC at once to test it.
it was that moment I realized, I'm grabbing this kid by the coatails and hanging on. I learned more about computers in the year or so I knew Steve than at any other point. Somewhere along the line 5chw4r7z and "Steve the Hacker" were born. back then i never heard of L337, but once I did we started messing around with it, kind of evolved over a summer, I think for awhile Steve was M351k but it never stuck with him likw 5chw4r7z did with me.
Youngstown

Catching up to him last weekend, he hasn't changed much, we talked tech for two hours solid, felt bad for the girls. They were pretty bored by time we talked ourselves out.
Youngstown
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5 comments

5 comments:

  1. I always love your stories about Steve the Hacker. I'm so sad I've never met him! I hope he knows how much you respect and admire his brain. (Steve, if you're reading: Bob loves you! I can see why.)

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  2. Thank you for the kind words. I actually forgot about that virus until just now. I remember we put one good copy of normal.dot on the file server and locked it down read-only so it wouldn't get re-infected. I can't believe it has been nearly 8 years. I remember all the fun adventures we had learning Cisco VoIP. Bob used to run the Cisco CallManager stats on his Linux box. You could see the peak highs and lows of calls throughout the day and all kinds of other stuff on real-time graphs. I remember the 3 monitors on his PC, including one of those 23" Sun CRTs, which probably weighed more than I do now. That, and Bob's demotivational posters. I miss those.

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  3. Jackie and Steve, if I ever got the two of you in the same room my head would explode from awesome.

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  4. Bob, I want to see those demotivational posters! I love the idea. There should be a @demotivationalposter Twitter account.

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  5. they were the posters from despair.com, one of the best, since we were doing a lot of coding at the time,

    "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."

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