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Club DJ

In 1999, my roommate was a bartender at The Metro Complex in Jacksonville. I met her at work a few times when it was a slow night and I thought she could use some company to help stay awake until they closed. It was during the time I was sitting around the club socializing with her and some of her friends that I realized I had never been exposed to house music. It dawned on me that every hard-thumping song I was hearing was a remix of a song that I actually really liked from the radio or a CD that I had heard.

I was instantly hooked.

Lauren introduced me to DJ Patrick and he was very positive about being willing to teach me. It wasn't long before I had a job working the light system and was learning the turntables. While Patrick was always voicing a willingness to help me learned, I actually learned very little about techniques from him. I was also working with DJ Rabbit, who was constantly teaching me things, and my roommate, Jayme, was also quite skilled and always willing to help.

I can remember seeing David Knapp spinning at Typhoon Lagoon in June of 2001 and being amazed at the way he worked. Instead of watching his mixer while he transitioned a new song in, he steadily watched the crowd. He could pick up on the way their movements changed, the number people that started dancing, or the number of people that looked as though they were moving off the dance area. The way he fed off the crowd's energy was enough to tell me that being a circuit DJ was undoubtedly my dream, albeit one likely to never happen.

After three years of DJing at Metro and other Florida clubs, I grew tired of the non-stop lifestyle and stopped collecting music. I was somewhat burned out on the club scene and tired from a lot of partying. I'm a turntablist and vinyl is very expensive in comparison to downloading music and burning it to CD. While I can (and to some extent, do) spin CDs, I certainly prefer being able to grab ahold of a turntable platter when I need to. That's a little trickier when using optical mediums.

Computer Geek

I've been using Linux off and on for the last three years or so, and while I've played around with it a bit, this is the first time that I actually use it, as opposed to just having it installed. I think part of the reason is that I'm much more dependent on Unix at work these days and there's just a different comfort level involved now. I started out with RedHat and I am now a faithful follower of the Gentoo flavor.

Most of the programming experience I have is self-learned, including SQL query development, Java and Visual Basic .NET development, and a little bit of Perl. I love writing code and much of my job is based on being able to automate tasks in Microsoft Office product using Visual Basic for Applications.

When it comes down to it, I'm a web designer at heart. I have done this for more than a decade (to put this into perspective, when I was teaching myself HTML, <TABLE> was a newly released tag in the specifications) and it's something I enjoy. I have limited skills as a traditional artist — I don't draw or paint very well and I've never tired sculpting — and this gives me an outlet to be creative.