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A long awaited follow up to My Career (Part 1)

During Freshman year of college I lived next door to a friend named Julian. We were both a *little* computer dorky but not really (read: spends too much time on computer, plays games, etc.. but doesn't know much about programming, development, networking). We both had Logitech webcams that came with that free Spotlife 30 day spotlife membership for hosting it. Once it ran out we were trying to decide if we should actually pay for the service or if there was some other way. Please don't ask why I cared that much about letting people see me zombie out at the computer anyway, it was a phase I guess. Julian suggested there had to be a way we could do it ourselves, so I set out to figure how. Fortunately UF offers free webspace to their students via plaza.ufl.edu accounts. I scoured the web, found a remote upload script, and voila we had webcams on our own pages, for free. That is pretty much what drew me in to web development. From there it just snowballed; had to make a nice page for the cam, had to make an entire personal site, had to make a blog.. you get the idea.

It became a passion. I would spend many hours creating, figuring, designing websites and learning about them at the same time. This was the year 2001 and on.. so the CSS storm had pretty much hit and I was it's lovechild. This means, unlike the rest of the world who had to *unlearn* table based design for the holy seperation of style and content, I never did, because I never really learned table based design. I went as far as to drag my then girlfriend into the internet head first, creating her a website, blog etc. What was so attractive and exciting to me about the web, is when you hit the save button and upload you have just released it to the world, not your neighborhood, not your friends, but the entire world. I love that.

I was creative as a child, as many were, but it withered for many years as I embraced other things like cycling and finance and just didn't put the time and effort into brainstorming or creating just for the sake of it. My interest in web design nurtured this part of me back to life. Subsequently my once profuse love of the finance industry withered as my love of web design blossomed. I was no longer interested in pursuing a career as an Underwriter. I was no longer interested in pursuing a life motivated by money; how much I would make, what I would own. After doing horrible in Business Finance, I finalized this decision by changing my major from Finance to Marketing.

To be continued, of course...