Mr TechSmart

In 1983 my first computer was the Commodore 64 also known as the C64. I used a small color TV as a monitor. It also had a tape drive to store programs. It was the best color computer ever. As a teen I spent many hour writing new programs. I was also the top programmer in the computer lab at high school. The love of electronics was now permanent in my life.

I upgraded to the C128 series and added a modem to be able to connect to Compuserve. This was the internet for many. There was also AOL “You Got Mail”. After that I started building my on PC. The Intel 486DX CPU come to mind with SCSI drives and floppy disks. At this point the real internet was starting to get fun. I provided support for others including my college professors on how to configure the boot memory, software applications and system configs.

After high school I decided that I wanted to be an Automotive technician. I had already spent years working on my motorcycles, cars and trucks. After moving to Cincinnati, Oh in 1987 and working in a print shop downtown I decided to attend an automotive tech college for a 2 year program. Once graduated at top of the class I took the ASE certification tests all at once. Yes, all of them and received my ASE Master Technician certificate. I also spent many hours in additional training for electronic fuel injection systems for all major brands. This became my speciality in the auomotive field. After an injury I decided a career change was needed and moved on. I still service my own and family vehicles today.

I had built a high end system for music recording and graphic design at this point. Early 90’s from what I remember. Working at a printing company I used this system to design pages for digital printing. I also installed the office LAN using coax for the network. I learned a lot about network cabling and phone systems. Upgrading the systems as new tech came out kept me busy. Our big customer was Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. I had designed a MS Access database to process emailed orders. It kept track of names, addresses, product inventory, order history, ship date and tracking numbers. I designed a few custom order processing systems for other companies as well using MS Access and visual basic.

In 1996 P&G wanted the company to handle orders worldwide for it’s sales force of 8000. We needed a better system and it needed to be on the internet. I was tasked with designing, building an IBM Web Server, installing a T1 internet line, configuring the domain name, design the DB2 database, building the backend web processing for a dynamic content product ordering system. You have to realize that Ebay was just created in 1995. This was all leading edge tech! The system was managed with DB2 linked data in MS Access for reports and data entry for updates. It also exported the daily orders to a floppy disk so that new addresses were automatically in the Fedex shipping computer. This system ran for a decade and worked flawless the entire time.

In the late 90’s I met my wonderful wife. Her dad was a college professor of music and an avid Ham Radio operator. His memorial website is garyjohnston.me that my wife and I built for him. His call sign was KI4LA. He convinced me to also get my radio license. These skills are invaluable and open paths to many areas of knowledge in technology and communications.

I started my own company in 2003 as Maxx Graphix. It was a sign shop and technology consulting. Besides signs I also did building wide Wifi systems using MikroTik routers. These were the most flexible and reliable systems I knew of for 802.11b/g. I also did large IP security camera systems using Hikvision products.

In the past 5 years I started using Ubiquity network systems. It gives customers the best value / performance for the money.

For my own company Maxx Graphix in 2003 I built a RedHat linux server to sell my products on and ran it in my own shop using a dynamic DNS for domain routing. Later I design a new website and hosted it at Hostgator. I used Cpanel to control the server and OSCommerce to build order processing websites. Joomla or WordPress CMS was used for the content and SEO. This website is hosted at Hostinger and uses WordPress.

Building, designing, integrating are what I live for. When others say it can’t be done, you should get a second opinion. I might know a solution off the top my head. Perhaps use a RaspBerry Pi with a custom outputs. Why not?

Contact me for your project or repair. I will get it done.

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