So, I thought I'd write a bio on what I have done with my life.  At least what I have done when it comes to computers.  First let me give you some general stuff about me.  I was born in St. Louis, Missouri on June 25th, 1977.  I grew up in Arnold, MO which is a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.  It was a pretty small town at the time, but now it's grown. Arnold has got about every fast food place, grocery store & department store you can think of. 

 

My first computer I ever had was a TI-99er. The year was 1983, and this machine was fantastic!  It was made by Texas Instruments.  I know Bill Cosby was their big spokesman at the time.  It had tons of atari rip-off games for it.  Instead of Pac Man they had Munch Man, Instead of Space Invaders, they had TI invaders.  It was a pretty cool system.  It was where I learn to write some simple programs.  One of the coolest features of the TI-99er was a speech synthesizer.  In other words, you could make the computer talk.  This was pretty cool addition to programs.  It sounded like a slow human-robot type thing.  It was the same voice you heard from those speak n spell toys.  Or as Dane Cook said in his stand up act, the speak like the devil toy.  But the coolest thing was making my computer say bad words.  It was one of the joys of being a 6 year old kid.

 

The second computer I remember getting was a Commodore 64. You remember the jingle don't you?!  "My friends come knocking down my door to get in to my Commodore 64"  Yeah, it was pretty cheesy, but it ruled.  There's not much to say about the C64.  When I got it, I was totally getting into gaming.  I remember one of the best games I had was Bruce Lee.  I guess I liked it because I actually beat the game, which at the time, was quite an accomplishment.  I got this computer around 1987.

 

Between the years of 89 - 92, I got into console gaming.  I had to get the Nintendo.  I was one of the last people on the planet to get one.  The reason was my mom & dad would never get me one.  I had to save up my own money to buy one.  I had all the money saved up to buy one.  Then we moved into a new house.  I left my wallet on my dresser in my old room.  I'm sure it was one of the movers who stole it.  But I had no proof.  So, I had to save all the money up again.  Anyway, everyone knows Nintendo, so I'm not going to go into it.

 

Okay, it was around 1992 - 93.  I can't remember the exact year.  We finally got a good computer.  We got a 486DX.  The dx was better than the sx because of some math processor.  This was the time when I learned about BBSes.  For those of you that don't know a BBS is a  bulletin board system.  Before the internet was affordable to get onto, many people had bbs's.  What it was, a person would setup a bbs on their computer.  Other people could call using their modem the person's computer. When they connected they could gain access.  The would have to login.  Once logged in, they could download / upload files, post messages,  send/receive email from other users on the bbs, or play online games.  I really got into this, because you could also chat with the sysOp (or system operator.  The problem was, my first modem was 2400 baud.  Which is very slow.  You know how slow dial up is at 56K.  Imagine 2K, which is what 2400 baud is about equal to.

 

 

I got into bbsing a lot.  My friend and I setup a bbs on his computer.  It was called the Rock N Roll Express.  My handle was Butthead, his handle was Beavis.  He was the SysOp, I was the Co-SysOp.  It was neat at the time.  But I always thought the graphics were kind of crappy.  Thats when I really got into the ansi art scene. 

 

In the bbs underground,  there were these art groups who made pictures and ads for different bbs's.  I ended up getting into making these ansi pics.  Okay, here's where my long story about ansi art groups start.  At the time, the biggest group was ACiD, which was an acronym for "Ansi Creators in Demand"  The small i was the cool thing to do.  That meant you were 3LiT3 (elite).  Anyway, I ended up joining a local group called 'CRiME'.  That's when I started making all sorts of ansi art and stuff.  The problem was, the group, crime, broke up about 3 weeks after I joined.  So, I never released anything with that group.  This was about the time too that I changed my handle to pitt.  I never changed my handle again after that point.

 

Lemme give you a little more to know about these art groups.  It was mostly a bunch of kids who drew bbs ads and logos so people's bbs's would look really nice.  There was a ton of groups, and each month a group would release a pack, which would be all the artwork from all the ansi artists from that group for the month.  There would usually be some sort of spiffy ansi viewer inside the pack to make it easy to view the art.  Also, you'd have your list of ansi group headquarters, official sites, etc.  It would just be another affil to add to your bbs.  Now, it sounds kind of lame, some of the stuff, but it was kind of fun at the time.

 

Okay, now back to me.  So, CRiME, broke up.  Another local group was forming.  The name of this group was ENMiTY.  It was a pretty lame name.  I released a few things with that group.  Then after 2 months, just like crime, they broke up too. 

 

About this time I finally paid to get on the internet.  I had a shell account.  So it was all text based.  For 20 bucks a month I had a text based internet service.  I could goto websites, but I was using lynx.  Lynx is a text based web viewer, I could goto the websites, but I could never see any pictures.  And it was really slow.  To get an internet account like everyone has now, it was going to cost $35 bucks a month.  I didn't have that money.  I pretty much used the internet for 2 things at the time.  Going to ftp sites to download the latest art packs and getting on the irc to chat.  The irc channel I went to frequently was #ansi.  I'm sure its still around today.  I'm sure it's not the same people on there.  But, at the time, I thought it was pretty cool, I could chat with people across the world that were running bbs's too and making ansi art. 

 

So, I got chatting with some people on the irc chat room #ansi.  I ended up joining another group called DoS.  I was surprised that they didn't have an 'i' in their name.  Because every group had an I in their name so they could make it lowercase and cool.  Like ACiD or iCE or the many other groups.  So I joined this group DoS, which I thought was cool.  It was the first group I was going to be in that wasn't a local 314 group.  But guess what?  DoS broke up, actually, they didn't break up, but they merged with another group called BROkEN.  Hey another group without an i, weird.  So I was with broken for one month, then they merged with CiA.  Which was very cool for me.  I was always a big fan of CiA.  They seemed to have quality artists.  And They had been around 2 years already, so I didn't think they could possible break up.

 

Before I get ahead of myself.  BBS's were changing.  Some of them were using new forms of graphics instead of just ansi.  The newer graphics were rip & jpg's.  I was intrigued by these new graphics.  You could make much better looking pictures.  The problem was, most bbs's still used ansi, because it didn't take as long to load.  But I got into doing some rip & jpg pictures.  I thought I was pretty good.  Other people may think differently.

 

Well, the year was 1994.  I was in CiA for a few months, then I decided to stop doing the artwork thing. I wanted to start my own ansi bbs, which I did, it was called Zero Hour.  It was really cool and modded up.  I used this bbs software called Renegade.  A lot of people would take renegade from the package, slap their bbs logo on it and call it a day.  I felt that I could totally customize and make my bbs look better than any of the other local bbs's in 314.  It looked great.  So great I decided to start my own group, not an ansi group, but a bbs modding group.  The name of my group was called FiRM.  Firm stood for Freaks in Renegade Modding.  I got a few other people, and we released packages similar to the ansi groups did.  Except in our packs were different ways to customize your bbs.  The ansi art community loved it.  It was the first thing of it's type.  Of course a bunch of other modding groups started popping up after firm's arrived.  I realized that I wanted people in the group to mod other bbs software besides renegade, so I changed the firm acronym to freaks in revolutionary modding.  That fit us better.

I started talking to some of the local ansi art guys.  They were all about my age.  So we had our little convention.  Better known as 314con!  It wasn't much,  we just all met up, hung out and went to Rocky Horror Picture show.  It was pretty fun.  But, It was before there were all these child molesters, killers, asking to meet kids, then killing them.

 

Everything was good in 1994, I had my cool spiffy bbs, Zero Hour, and my modding group, firm.  I decided to join up with another art group.  This group was so cool, they release packs whenever they felt like it.  It was more of a voluntary group.  The group was called DVS.  One of the cool things dvs would do was have these teleconferences or conf's as we called them.  What it was, there was a 1800 number you called, you put in a pin number, and you had 20 people on the line.  We spent a lot of time crank calling people. 

 

One of the funniest things I remember them doing is calling a McDonald's up and convincing the manager they were the regional supervisor.  And there were problems with their connection to their computer.  We got the manager to thing the computer was overheating, so we had him unplug the computer and pour water in it.  We could hear him spilling water all over the place.  It was really funny.

 

This was also the time I started getting into punk rock.  I was really getting into it, especially the local bands.  I decided to make 2 bbs's instead of just one.  So when you called up my computer, you could select Zero Hour, my ansi art bbs, or Caffeine, my all music bbs.  It wasn't that big of a hit, because zero hour was so popular, not many people even checked out caffeine.  But it was really cool to me.  Around summer of 95, I got a girlfriend and she was taking up most of my time.  So I decided to kill my modding group firm.  Well, I didn't kill it, instead I merged it with a group called TMS, also known as the mod squad.  They were a good modding group and I would say tms & firm were the 2 biggest modding groups.

 

In the beginning of 96 I decided to get back into the art scene again.  Only this time, I wanted to start my own group.  So I did.  The name of the group was gravity.  I didn't want to join in and make the small letter I like all the other groups did, so I did it all in lowercase.  I got a few local people.  The people I remember getting to join my little group was impact, shatters, demize, & shadow image.  I'm sure these names mean nothing to you.  Well, they really don't me anymore.  But we released a cool little pack.  The reviews were out and people liked us.  We ended up releasing 5 packs before I finally quit the whole ansi thing once and for all.

 

The whole bbs thing was starting to die, because more and more people were communicating on the internet.  You could do anything you wanted to on a webpage instead of a bbs.  It was a fun time, but now it was gone. 

 

Then the whole internet boom started.  Of course, I had to start my own website, which I did.  It was called Jurassic Punk.  I called it that because I took a Jurassic Park logo, changed it to say Jurassic Punk and gave the dinosaur a mowhawk.  It was basically just a page with a bunch of links to record labels and punk bands.  I also had a section where you could listen to streaming cd's of bands on epitaph records.  Another cool thing was my reviews of cds.  I would review cds of different bands.  Doing this was cool, because record labels would send me all their new cd's for free.  They just wanted me to review them!  I was really happy about that.  I remember 3 record labels that would send me the cds for free,  it was BYO records, Fat Wreck Chords, & Asian Man Records.  I learned later that another easy was to get free cds was to join a band or label's street team.  They'll send you free cd's & merch, as long as you keep inventory on their artists at a couple music stores.

 

After I dropped my account from inlink.com , my website got shutdown too.  So I started another website on geocities.  Which is where you can make a free website.  I made one called tainted meat.  I was trying to do the same thing I did with Jurassic Park, but it never really took off.  The biggest thing I remember reviewing was the 1997 Warped Tour in Chicago.  During that show it rained for like 6 hours.  So they could only have 1 stage open instead of the usual 4 stages.

 

So, finally one day I decided that I'm going to turn all this computer knowledge into a career.  I decided to go back to school.  In 2002, I started going to school at Vatterott College in St. Louis.  I've been going ever since.  Since then, I've got an associates degree  in computer technology & network.  I've got a few certifications:  A+, Linux+, & Microsoft Certified Professional.  Right now I'll be getting my bachelors degree in July 2005.  So I'm really close and I'm really excited.

 

I've had many various websites.  One site I made was called sick records.  It was for a fake record company with a band called twisted skynard.  It was a fun little project, but I never kept up with it, because of school.  I also made a Christmas site for my friends and family.  This site I'll finally be able to do something with and keep up with.  I'll be out of school soon and have tons of time to update this thing.  After seeing a cool site like X-Entertainment, I decided that I could do something like that.  It doesn't seem that hard.  Write an article, and people will comment.  You'll see what will happen to this site in the month ahead and I hope you enjoy it. 

 

Thank you for visiting half-assed productions,

 

Greg