About
Me in Kristen’s room. Lots of green going on here…
I was born in Hale Center, Texas and was raised on a farm out in the country 7 miles from town. Growing up in the country was great and I can’t picture growing up as a kid any other way. My brother and I ran around barefoot, had a three-wheeler at our disposal and could take a leak anywhere we pleased! We lived out in the country with no Internet or Cable TV until I was twelve years old. When I was a teenager we lived in town and finally got Cable TV, which was a life changing event for me. More than four static channels! Later that year our family would relocate to south Texas where my Dad had a new job as a teacher.
It was here that I really got into computers for the first time. Dad taught among other things a technology course that was full of cutting edge hardware from 1994! Computer controlled lathes, a robotic arm controlled via Serial Port, Windows 3.1! I spent hours in his class afterschool playing with the various computers and getting aquainted to each of the programs. Finally after two years later we purchased our first 486 computer complete with Windows 95 and 4mb of RAM. Here is where I cut my teeth on Microsoft products and got to know the ins and outs of operating systems, ram installation and other basic computer hardware.
When I was a sophomore I had saved enough money to purchase my own computer for myself. It was an Acer computer, 350 mhz with 32mb of RAM and an 8mb graphics card! It was hard to imagine a few short years later I would have twice the RAM on my graphics card as our original computer had for system RAM! I learned and used Windows 98SE on this computer.
By the time I had entered college at Texas Tech in 2000, I was at the point where I was building my own PC’s with aftermarket parts from Newegg. I had several creations over the years at college that allowed me to get very familiar with hardware and PC troubleshooting at the same time. Also I had began to tinker with Linux over the years and learned most of what I know now about Linux during college.
After graduating with an MIS Degree, I worked as a Systems Administrator in the Business College. To me this was a natural progression from my hobby to my career. Here I would get familiar with Active Directory, DHCP and DNS on a server level. At my peak I was maintaining close to 40 production servers for the college that ran anything from their website to lab servers and more.
After working at the college I took a job in Amarillo as an IT Consultant to a small business. I had the knowledge to do the job, but I soon learned that being a consultant is a completely different ballgame. It’s having to improvise and be quick on your feet, making sure you get the job done on the first visit. Being a consultant there definitely helped me improve my customer relationships and made me a better salesman in the process as well.
After being a consultant for a year I felt I had developed the skills to take my operation solo and start my own business. This had been my greatest challenge in life, but also the most rewarding to date. I now operate as an IT Consultant for my own business, TwentyFive Group, LLC. The company just turned one year old as of February 20th, 2009. Currently we have offices located in Lubbock, Texas and Brooklyn, New York.
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