What makes you think you can blog...?

I'm sure there are hundreds of new blogs started every day, and I'm sure every new blogger gets pounded with questions. Let me ask some of them for you:

"How can you call yourself a computer geek?"

Easy. I wrote my first BASIC program when I was in seventh grade, which was back in 19...well...more years ago than I'd care to admit. Let's just say that it was written on a Heathkit homebuilt TRS computer, and stored on a cassette tape, and leave it at that. I've taken some side-trips out of the computer world on occasion--I've been an aircraft electronics specialist, librarian, disk jockey, even cable puller and newspaper delivery--but I always seem to keep coming back to the digital world.

Got to be a screw loose in the logic circuits in my head somewhere, or I'm just a glutton for punishment...

In the computer world, I've built, sold, trouble-shot, repaired, installed, networked, cleaned, and yes, programmed computers, all the way back to the Apple IIc, Apple IIGS, and PC XT. (For those of you who never touched those systems, that was in the day when you were lucky to have 64 kilobytes of memory, not megabytes, and if you had a hard drive, you were one of the lucky elite!).

So, yes, I do feel qualified to call myself a computer geek, and am proud to wear the label. What's it to you?

"So, you're a geek with a blog. What's the point?"

There's one thing I learned, years ago, when I accepted my first computer tech job.

Geeks can't speak English.

No matter what the tech's skill level, they always seem to have trouble translating technospeak into English. Just watch the client's eyes glaze over while the tech explains why their system won't run correctly ("See, you've got this TSR program with a memory leak, and it's cross-indexing with the reserved memory used by your Winsock program, and the result is a buffer overflow error in your video ROM...").

I set out to make sure I didn't have that problem. In all the years I've worked in the computer world, I've always tried to develop a knack for explaining computer-ese into English. And this blog is the next logical step in all of that.

That's what makes me think I can blog...years of experience learning to translate geek to English.

The goal of Data, Demystified is just what it says--to make the technical, readable. Our primary focus will be database-oriented, with occasional forays into whatever other topics might arise; and the database explanations will be illustrated in MS Access or SQL. Comments and criticisms (and especially requests for help) will always be appreciated.

Thanks for stopping by, welcome aboard, I hope you enjoy the ride!