Getting to Know….Me

by Trish Smith

As an avid blog reader, I often find myself wanting more information about the writers of the blogs I read. Most of the blogs I read are personal blogs, and so I learn most of what I want to know through the blog content itself. But on a professional blog, such as this one, you rarely read much about the writers. I know that the bios of the Security Catalyst writers do give you some information, but I’m sure you’ve caught yourself wondering, from time to time, just who we are.

In that spirit, I’m devoting this month’s blog posting to a little “Getting to know you (or rather, me)” session. Hopefully by the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll know a little more about me and about why I became a Security Catalyst writer.

My computer experience began in 1990, when my high school installed a computer lab and began offering various programming courses. I quickly discovered that, although I wasn’t interested in becoming a programmer (a course in C++ confirmed it), computers could be very useful to me. Unfortunately, personal computers were still at a fairly early stage, and didn’t offer much by way of everyday usefulness. My first computer was a Commodore 64; I love to horrify my teenage nephews with stories about how we used to have to use tapes (which looked exactly like audio tapes) to store programs. It wasn’t unusual for it to take an hour for a game we wanted to play to download off the tape, frequently including some corruption of the data that forced us to repeat the entire process. Thus, at this point computers were (for me, anyway) still largely used for playing games and noodling around with Basic programming (I can still write a mean program loop using IF – THEN). But I believe that by beginning my computer education as a kid, I didn’t cripple my quest for information with the fear that I might “break something” (which, in my experience, is the biggest barrier to most people becoming comfortable with computers).

My experience with, and exposure to, personal computing continued through college, where computers finally became fast enough and powerful enough to be more than just a toy. This is where they began to make my life as a student easier.

I continued using computers through graduate school, along the way graduating to a 386, then a 486, and then finally (finally!) moving to a Mac. You’d never know it from my devotion to Apple computers, but when I first began using Macs (spurred by a then-boyfriend’s proficiency in them and easy access to his then-blazing-fast laptop) I resisted them vigorously. It didn’t take me long, however, to discover their appeal, and barring some necessary forays into the world of Windows PCs for work (and to fix my husband’s PC from time to time), I’ve stayed with them ever since. One little-known secret: Apple computers are great for those of us with compulsive tendencies. When I owned a Windows machine, I was forever “cleaning up” my computer by deleting all the weirdly-named little files that were installed on my hard drive with new programs. Inevitably, the files I deleted were ones I needed to run some essential piece of programming. So the fact that Mac programs tend to be fairly self-contained is a definite plus for us OCD-types.

The other significant aspect of my experience on computers has been my “online” experience, or what the kids today call “social media” (and yes, that was said firmly tongue-in-cheek). I began my own social media exposure on Compuserve, in chatrooms and private IM. I remember the beginning of AOL (and oh, how we all loathed it then, too), and IRC, and even farther back, BBS’s. I have that to thank for my own lack of crippling awe over websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

So generally speaking, my comfort level with computers (and, by extension, with computer people/geeks/techies/what-have-you) was developed through years of exposure to computers, and through the realization that they really aren’t very intimidating at all (computers, that is; computer geeks are sometimes an entirely different story).

This is probably the simplest reason that I’m here, the only non-tech person writing in a sea of tech writers. I suspect I should be more intimidated than I am; but as I said, a long education in and exposure to computers have removed most of my sense of awe. Fortunately, they haven’t removed my interest in and fascination with them, which is the other reason I’m here. I see all of this as your benefit: My non-tech perspective on the tech world, my lack of awe, and my continuing fascination with and interest in computers are all characteristics I gladly use in service of you, our devoted readers.