Quick History
- Raised in Seffner, Florida.
- Lived in same house from age 2 until I left for school.
- Attended grades 1-10 in Tampa. Yep, same school all 10 years.
- Attended boarding academy near Orlando for grades 11 and 12.
- Spent first two college years in Tennessee.
- Finished last two college years in Michigan.
- Graduated in 1992 with a Bachelor of Technology in Media Technology/Media Communication.
- After graduation, obtained an internship back in central Florida and am now a full-time worker at the same office.
- On August 9 (8/9/10 @ 11:12 am), I married my sweetie, Lori. We currently reside in Apopka, northwest of downtown Orlando.
A Few Things I Enjoy
- Road trips.
- Driving.
- Sightseeing.
- Geocaching.
- Walking.
- Biking.
- Rollerblading.
- Swimming (leisure/recreational, not competitive).
- Scenic and landscape photography, especially lighthouses.
- Goofing around with my best friends.
- Stupid and silly photos with/of my friends, goofing around.
- Virtually anything involving Macintosh computers, especially internet browsing and doing fun projects with Final Cut Pro and InDesign.
Esteemed Colleagues
I served as web editor with About This Particular Macintosh since March 2000. The publication officially produced its last issue May 2012. One of my roles was to check for rendering mistakes in each issue’s HTML edition before it went public. I also kept the link pages up to date and contributed a number of articles, reviews, and desktop wallpaper images over the years. For the short-term future, I’ll continue monitoring comments posted to the pages.
In addition, my involvement with ATPM resulted in my becoming acquainted with my best online friend.
My Computer History
Sometime around 8th or 9th grade, my parents bought a Commodore VIC-20 as my first computer, not counting my old Atari 2600. A Commodore 64 followed soon after which was traded for a C-128 in exchange for me doing a few chores for my old elementary school. I’d previously been involved in the BBS community until after college. Once I moved into an apartment and actually owned a phone line, I began my internet addiction using the C-128 with a 2400 baud modem an a Linux shell account from Orlando Online. My first e-mail address was bennett@oo.com.
Since that time, I progressed through a Performa 577 (the first Mac I personally owned, though I had, of course, used Macs during college), followed by a PowerBook 3400, a PowerBook G3 (Pismo model), a 1GHz 15″ Titanium PowerBook G4, and a 2.2GHz 15″ MacBook Pro which I use on a few rare occasions. My wife has started using it more than me.
My primary machine is now a Quad Core 2.66GHz Nehalem Mac Pro. Its 640GB system drive and 1TB data drive are cloned nightly to two 1TB drives, all housed in the Mac Pro’s four hard drive bays. My wife and I store our digital photo archives on a Drobo that is currently at 3TB of capacity (1.8TB available after protection) and can be increased in capacity as needed.
I’m still using the default 3GB of RAM but hope to upgrade it to 6GB in the near future (6 instead of 8 because of the tests that show Nehalems perform better when RAM is installed in multiples of 3).
When not using the desktop machine, I’m often found with my iPad which has quickly become my go-to device when I don’t absolutely need a desktop or laptop computer.
October 2003, I purchased a 450MHz G4 to use as a server. It held multiple hard drives for things like my iTunes library (accessed via networking), my personal photo albums, and general storage that could be accessed remotely. I permanently retired this machine July 2009, and all my media now resides on the Mac Pro, including the photo album web server. I’m considering migrating all the photos to Flickr, and may have already done so except for waiting to see if Flickr begins to suffer due to Yahoo!’s recent flailing.
At work, I have progressed through a IIci, a 300MHz G3, a dual 800MHz G4, a quad 2.5GHz G5, and currently an 8-core, 2.4GHz Intel Xeon Westmere with 6GB of RAM and four 1TB hard drives on a hardware RAID card. (Funny how even just one core of a 2.4GHz Intel is so much faster than one core of a 2.5GHz G5, just because of the difference in overall architecture.) The G5 was going to be repurposed into a dedicated video editing station for freelance and intern workers to our office, but it began exhibiting problems, possibly due to the power controller, and isn’t really fit for use any more.
I used to occasionally mention my pride of being a Macintosh user by the fact that I own a custom license plate that reads, well, MAC-USER! It’s sort of surprising to admit to myself that I’m thinking I might give it up soon if I come up with something new and better. Any ideas?
