About Me

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.
  • I now reside a few miles west of downtown Orlando having moved from Altamonte Springs, north of Orlando, in 2005.

A Few Things I Enjoy

Esteemed Colleagues

I have served as web editor with About This Particular Macintosh since March 2000. Besides monitoring comments posted to the pages and keeping up with the links pages, I check for rendering mistakes in each issue’s HTML edition before it goes public. I’ve also contributed a number of articles, reviews, and desktop wallpaper images over the years.

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 then a 2.2GHz 15″ MacBook Pro which I currently still use, but it has now been relegated to road warrior duty, along with whenever I want online access while sitting out in the living room.

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. Plus, I run Time Machine archives of my user folder and entire data drive to a Drobo that is currently at 3TB of capacity (1.5TB available after protection). Suffice to say, I’m no longer messing around when it comes to backing up my data.

I’m still using the default 3GB of RAM but will likely upgrade it to 6GB in the very near future (6 instead of 8 because of the tests that show Nehalems perform better when RAM is installed in multiples of 3).

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.

At work, I have progressed through a IIci, a 300MHz G3, a dual 800MHz G4, and currently a quad 2.5GHz G5 upgraded to 4.5GB of memory and a total of 500GB of hard drive space (250 per drive).

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?