About...
Preface
About... how excitingly vague. Well some of you are probably wondering who I am and what exactly is this thing called uberkewl. So I imagine that I should get down to it and put the issue to rest. I will start by telling you who I am and where I am currently in the grand flowchart of my life, then I will do a flashback kind of thing to let you know how I got to this point. So hang on it is a pretty long ride.
uber (oober) adj. An irregular transliteration of the German über which in the late 1990's became a synonym for the word super.
kewl (kool) adj. Internet slang for the English slang version of the word cool.
uber + kewl = uberkewl
Introduction
My
name is Ed Morrow and I am a middle aged computer nerd that has spent almost
half of his life messing with computers. Twenty years to be accurate. I
have dabbled in just about everything that one can do with a computer. For
those of you who have been along for the ride, I can remember Microsoft
DOS 2.11 (a long time before Windows
was even a thought in Bill's
mind) and I started computing on Commodore
64s and 128s.
I am now a full time college student on a quest for paper of worth (A Masters
Degree or better in Computer Science). On May 14th of 2006 I earned my first
degree, an Associates of Arts and Science in Computer Information Systems
with a Technical Emphasis. I was awarded the degree by Illinois
Central College which is located in East
Peoria, Illinois. I currently live in a small studio apartment in Bloomington,
Illinois with my computer network. :) It stays in the living room which
we share. We (the network and I) relocated to Bloomington to continue the
quest and attend classes at Illinois State
University which is about 10 blocks away in Normal
Illinois. Yea I moved here because I wanted to be close to Normal. :)
Don't Mess with Texas...
In the Fall of 1987 I lived in a suburb of the Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex where I found myself unemployed and on the wrong side of the law. After spending 28 days in the Dallas County Jail for a drug possession charge, I was offered a chance to move back to Illinois and attend college. The offer came from my parents who were worried that if I didn't do something to improve my life that I would end up dead or in prison. Realizing that I was going nowhere fast in the great state of Texas, I accepted the offer and moved back to East Peoria, Illinois. After I arrived in East Peoria, I realized that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to go to college, but I had no direction that I wanted to pursue, this would soon change.
The Commodores
When
I first started messing with computers, computer memory was extremely sparse
and most home computers had only 64 thousand bytes of memory, or 128 thousand
if you were lucky, or if you were extremely lucky you could afford a top
of the line IBM PC with 640 thousand bytes of memory. I wasn't that lucky.
My parents had purchased a Commodore
C128D personal computer and this would be my introduction to the world
of computers. At first I was intimidated by it because I didn't understand
how it worked. One day I sitting there looking at it and I remembered something
that a co-worker told me while we were working on a construction crew together.
He said, "Ed you gotta be smarter than what you are messing with." His language
was a little bit more colorful than that, but you get the idea... I knew
I was smarter than a machine and a computer is nothing more than a machine
so I broke out the Commodore User's Manual and started reading. I would
soon learn that the software that made the computer work, the operating
system, was based on a dialect of the BASIC
programming language, and that by creating files of BASIC commands that
I could get the computer to perform complicated tasks. Software for the
Commodore was extremely expensive but I didn't let that stop me. I found
a magazine that catered to Commodore users and it always had program code
published in it for things like databases and even games. I would type all
that code in and make the program work. Then I would analyze the code and
see exactly what made the program tick (so to speak). It wasn't long before
I was writing my own programs. It was great fun and I loved it. Before long
I ran into major problems with my programs. My programs had grown so large
and complex that they had outgrown the memory limitations of the machine
and the computer would "freak out" doing all kinds of weird things. It was
time to move on. I loved it and I was hungry for more knowledge. The computer
gave me control over something in my life and I wanted to learn more ways
to control computers.
The Beginning of the Quest
In the Spring of 1988 I started my quest for paper of
worth. Thanks to my parents, I was able to advance into the wonderful world
of IBM PCs and things would never be the same. 
I
registered for classes at Illinois Central
College, and I enrolled in a BASIC
programming class along with a few other classes which included English
Composition, Elementary Algebra, and a Vocational Choice class designed
to help me decide what I wanted to be when I grew up... That semester I
learned where the college computer lab was found and I fell in love with
the place because I had full access to the computers and the best development
software available at the time. I lived in that lab occasionally leaving
to take a programming test or sometimes to attend an algebra class.
The Vectorheads
There was a small group of about 10 people who hung out in the lab and we formed a clique and called ourselves vectorheads. With the advent of our little club came the peer pressure... no they didn't introduce me to drugs and alcohol.. it was something far more addicting... the programming languages Pascal, Cobol, and C. I learned that BASIC was an acceptable computer language for some applications, COBOL is a computer language for non programmers (yuck), Pascal is pretty cool, but C rules them all. Kelly Stevens, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie became my mentors for C. Kelly Stevens introduced me to C and Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published The C Programming Language. So I spent my days in the dungeon (the college computer lab was located in the basement with no windows) trying to learn how to code in Pascal and C.
Thank Barnes and Noble
Well I didn't have any books on these languages and the magazine that had served me so well with the Commodore did not cover these topics at all. This led to my love affair with Barnes & Noble book stores. I spent hours upon hours in these heavenly book havens perusing the large selection of programming reference manuals, looking for the books that covered the topics and coding methods that I wanted to know about. Not only did I discover reference manuals but I also discovered the periodicals that would replace my beloved Commodore Users magazine, Dr. Dobbs Journal. I have easily spent over a thousand dollars on reference material. Programming manuals are not cheap. They typically run $50.00 or more for a single book.
Houston, We Have a Problem
There were serious consequences to my method of education. My BASIC programming class was no problem at all, in fact I scored extremely well in that class even though I only attended it when there were tests. The problem was with the rest of my classes that I failed to attend due to the fact that I couldn't pull myself off the computers in the lab. Those instructors were not at all impressed by my BASIC programming abilities, and my grades reflected that fact. That semester was the epitomy of irony. I earned an A in a language that I had just started learning a few months earlier (BASIC) and I failed in a language that I had spoken and written all of my life (English Composition). I would eventually learn that you generally earn better grades if you attend your classes and not spend all your time in the computer lab. My parents were less than pleased with my grades and who could blame them. They spent hundreds of dollars of their hard earned money on my tuition and books, the least I could have done was attend the classes, especially since I was there anyway in the computer lab. I did pass my Algebra class but it would be another 3 years before I would attempt to attend classes again. My love affair with computers did not end there, if it had you wouldn't be reading this page. The computer lab at the community college was pretty open, no sign in sheets, no need to present student ID cards or anything, so even though I wasn't an actual registered student I could still go in there and use the lab and since I knew lots of people in there, getting the software wasn't difficult either. I spent the next 3 years working at restaurants and spending as much time as I could writing code in one language or another.
Invasion of the OOP
Pascal was a pretty simple to learn programming language for me. There had been some new technological advances in programming methodology and in compiler design that introduced a new concept, Object Oriented Programming or OOP as it would become known. Borland International introduced it for the first time in their brand new Turbo Pascal 5.5 Integrated Development Environment. I remember this because I was very excited about it and had been reading about it in my beloved Dr. Dobbs Journal. As soon as I got a copy of the Turbo Pascal 5.5 Integrated Development Environment (programming editor and compiler in one convenient software package) I started coding using OOP. In the Spring of 1991 I made another feeble attempt at college classes. I was extremely excited about my classes but I was excited for the wrong reasons. I had been playing with the new OOP extensions and was excited because I thought that the college instructor would be teaching the new methodology, so I went and signed up for a Pascal programming class as well as a couple more classes. I was in my pascal class and I approached my instructor with a problem I was having at home with a program I was working on that used OOP, and he told me that he couldn't help me because he had just started working with OOP himself. It was not the thing to say to someone like me. I lost all faith in his ability to teach me anything at that moment and stopped attending class and only showed up for the tests which made him mad and so I withdrew from the class.
From C To Shining C++
Up to this point learning new programming languages had been fairly easy for me, the C programming language was a different story. C is an extremely powerful high level programming language and I found that some of the concepts were extremely hard to grasp. The main things that gave me a hard time were indirection and pointers. I realize that many of you don't have a clue what these things are but they gave me a hard row to hoe and it took me a long time to finally get a grip on them. These same things are the where most of C's power lie so they could not be ignored. The time I spent learning C was worth it. If you happen to be a wannabe C coder, let me suggest two books which you should not be without; C Primer Plus from the Waite Group and C The Complete Reference by Herbert Schildt. They worked wonders for helping me and I would never have been able to learn the language without them. C became my language of choice after figured out pointers and redirection and even though I prefer to use C++ today, I still use C on occasion. C++ is basically OOP for C so it was alot easier for me to learn. Many people think that programming students should learn C++ first and then learn C, and I am not going to refute those opinions here. All I am going to say is I am glad I learned the languages in the order that I learned them.
Who Needs a Formal Education?
My second attempt in 1991 was not a complete failure, it taught me a very valuable lesson. Very often strong emotion and logic cannot occupy the conscience at the same time without destroying one or the other and logic is usually the loser. It would be another 12 years before I would return to college. To justify my decision to quit school I told myself and everyone around me that I did not need a degree to be successful in the IT (Information Technology) field. So I continued working at restaurants, gas stations, and anywhere I could find a job while I wrote code in my spare time. I submitted resumes to IT headhunters and applied for IT jobs in the newspaper but I always got the same response. "We are looking for someone with a little more formal education than what you have", or "We really wanted someone who can hit the ground running" which was always followed by "We are looking for someone with a little more formal education than what you have." After a few years of this, I decided to try something else...
Morrow Software
Over the years, I have developed a few software applications, and all software has some form of copyright or license. I felt that I needed a business identity so I assumed the name Morrow Software. The first program that I wrote for money was when I was attending college. I was approached by a fellow student who was in charge of taking care of a local high school's computer lab and he kept complaining about students deleting files rendering the computer useless for class and asked if I would write a program for him to find out who the offending students were. So I wrote a simple program for him that created a hidden log file that logged everytime the delete command was used. The log file stored the date, time, and the exact command. So that all he had to do when a computer was vandalized was to ask the teacher who had the class on that day and at that time who was sitting in that desk. Yea I know a snitch program. I sold it for $5.00 and some blank floppy disks.
Dice 10000 aka My First Roll of the Dice
One winter many many moons ago, I decided to write a
game program and release it under the shareware concept. For those of you
who don't know what shareware is let me define it for you. Shareware is
copyrighted software that is released on the honor system. Basically we
write the software and put it somewhere for you to download (like on the
internet or back then on a BBS
system) so that you can try it out, hoping that you will like the program
and want to support it by paying a registration fee. Most of the time you
will get a basic working version of the software with some features left
out so that you will feel encouraged to pay for the extra features that
are available. Anyway this is how my shareware was released. The game program
was called Dice 10000. 
It
was a DOS based program that I wrote on an old Kaypro 80286 PC with an EGA
graphics adapter. The game was graphic and had built in mouse control (which
was something back then) and 5 fully shaded and rendered 3D dice, and supported
up to 9 players and had a intelligent computer opponent for single player
mode. The game took me 6 months to write and debug. I distributed it to
every large BBS
in the country which took a while considering that I only had a 2400 bps
modem (2.4 kbps) at the time and I released a chopped version of the game
with only single player mode available. For a registration fee of $5.00
you could purchase the full version and get the multiplayer support and
a printed manual. I didn't make any money off the game, it appears that
at that time no one really cared about multi-player support, only single
player and that was free. One good thing did come of my program. A shareware
distribution company named NightOwl Productions burned my program onto one
of thier shareware collection CDROMs, so I am a published software developer.
I know it don't seem like much today with everyone and their brother having
a CD/DVD burner. But back then, only commercial businesses could afford
them and it meant something to know that my program would still be lying
around in someones basement after I ceased to exist.
The Internet Revolution
Who would have ever thought that there would be a global network which was publicly available to anyone with a modem? Well not me, but someone did, because hello world it is here and there is no turning back now. Nothing in the history of mankind will alter so many people's lives as drastically and irrevocably as the internet or "the net" as we call it today. I remember a time before the internet when we used Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to share files and messages. It was a magical time of SysOps (System Operators) and FIDONET which was a pretty much global message system. It might take a couple days but your message would reach the other side of the planet eventually. Faster than postal mail but not nearly as fast as the net is today. I used to love opening up my Blue Wave program so that I could read the programming forums and ask my questions and help those whose questions I could answer. And almost all the BBS's had games. Not like todays games, but text based games like Legend Of The Red Dragon (LORD) and Usurper. I still have my registered copy of LORD on a 3.5 inch floppy disk. Thank You Seth Able, you gave me many many hours of enjoyment playing that game.
IRC and USENET
When the internet was still in its infancy and there was not a thing called the web or webpages many of you probably wonder why us geeks were so excited about it. We were excited because we could share ideas, thoughts and dreams with other people like us worldwide in an instant. Email was cool and everything but the ability to chat with people on a common topic in realtime was where it was at. Sadly for the most part these services which are still available are largely overlooked because of all the new web based chat rooms and forums out there. The services I am talking about are IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the USENET Newsgroups. I still prefer IRC over a web based chatroom any day of the week. I have my own IRC server at irc.uberkewl.net that is open to the public. I used to hang out on a few other IRC servers from time to time. My favorite server was irc-2.mit.edu located at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, it is no longer online due to someone's ignorance. Evidently they didn't realize how important that server was to alot of us and when they were renovating the computer labs it got lost and was never put back online. I used to hang out there sometimes in channels #chatzone and #woohoo and was known by the alias LordHacker. The USENET Newsgroups are large message forums where you can ask questions on just about any topic under the sun. There is probably a forum there that covers it. Not to mention that you can download just about any kind of file you want from the binary newsgroups (including movies and music).
UNIX, Linux and Other Alternative Operating Systems
Many people who spent thousands of dollars on computer
related education resent a certain
software corporation who markets the dominant
operating system of the world because that operating system makes it
simple for other people who did not spend such large sums on education to
perform the same tasks that they can do. Some people resent the company
because of their questionable business practices. And some people resent
them because they don't feel like the world should be force fed flawed software.
I
personally think that of the three reasons listed I tend to side with reason
2. Whatever the reason, there are basically 2 other directions you can go
to avoid this certain companies software. The first is Apple
Computers Macintosh
and OS-X, the second
is Unix or one of its clones,
Linux, BSD
or whatever. Unix is the grandfather of Operating Systems it has been around
since long before Microsoft was a company much less a corporation. It used
to be that Unix was not
an operating system for beginners, but today many things have changed which
make it a very feasible option for many computer users. Installations are
fairly painless and pretty much automatic. If I had to choose between the
3 major Operating Systems, I'd choose Linux.
Yea I have one of THAT companies operating systems running on one third
of the uberkewl network, but the other two thirds is strictly Linux.
Why not all Linux? Basically
2 reasons. The first being that many of the games that I like to play are
not available under that platform and the second being that the web and
graphic development tools that I used to create this website are not available
under Linux either. Should
both of these reasons be satisfied, I would switch my remaining machines
over to Linux in a heartbeat.
3D First Person Multiplayer Gaming
OhMyGosh is right, Castle Wolfenstein and DOOM need I say more? If so, then let me say this Id Software. Still don't have a clue? DOOM was the first of a new breed of games. It is the granddaddy of first person shooters with a twist, it could be played on a computer network so that Barry, David and I could virtually shoot each other after work and still go home for dinner instead of to the hospital with gunshot wounds. DOOM doomed me to be addicted to all the the games to follow and unlike my Dice 10000, DOOM was very successful with shareware. So successful that it eventually went full retail and could be purchased at your favorite software store. Id Software did not stop there. They followed with a sequel DOOM II, then came Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, DOOM III, and just recently released Quake IV. Other software companies jumped on the first person shooter wagon and released more killing goodness for the masses like Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, Halflife and the modification to Halflife called Counter-Strike which was followed by Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike:Source and last but not least America's Army Operations. I am a confessed first person shooter addict, I love them all. I consider it to be digital crack and I am a digital crackhead. If you haven't started playing these games, then for the love of everything that is holy please don't. If it is already too late for you, I'll be seeing you on an internet battleground, prepare to die.
So You Wanna Be a Truck Driver
Over The Road Truck Driving... I did it for about 5
years until my license was suspended for speeding in Ohio. I hated OTR driving.
It is a huge scam where the driver always loses. Lots of people say "They
make lots of money!" This is total hogwash. Sure you can bring home
$600.00/week as a company driver if you bust your ass, but remember this,
you are NEVER home, you are always at work, you eat at work, sleep at work,
and shower at work (when you get the opportunity) so after you tally all
the hours you spend at work you average $600.00 / 120 hours = 5.00/hr. Yea,
you can have that job, I don't want it. 
Not
to mention that you can only make that kind of money if you really hump
and often times you find yourself between a rock (the law) and a hard place
(your dispatcher). The dispatcher tells you to have the load there tomorrow
by 8:00am because it is a JIT (just in time) delivery and you have to speed
or lie on your log book to make it look legal. If you refuse well the dispatcher
will make sure you sit at the truck stop for a couple days meaning you don't
turn enough miles to even make your lousy 5.00/hr. If you break the law,
well the company lays that at your feet too, they won't be paying the fine,
you will and if your license gets suspended you don't have a job anymore.
How can you be employed as a driver if you can't legally drive? And to top
it all off, if you get fired because your license is suspended, you can't
claim unemployment insurance benefits because the company will say "He
broke the law".
Who Needs a Formal Education? I Do!
In 2003, I returned to school and I am here for the duration now. As I mentioned before, I earned my Associates Degree from Illinois Central College in May of 2006. I was accepted into the Computer Science program at Illinois State University and start attending classes there on August 21, 2006. I moved to Bloomington, Illinois at the beginning of August 2006 so that I would be closer to campus. The quest for paper of worth has been put into overdrive or as a truck driver would put it "I got the hammer down and I'm mashin' my motor." PhD or Bust!