My Technology filled life

My Experience With Technology

I’ve had an interesting in all things Tech from a very young age. I remember being 5 years old mad that I couldn’t connect to internet when using the home computer, even though I’ve never used it. I just knew at the end of commercials it said to visit this website. Even though I was constantly told we don’t have internet service, I tried to type in the address in AOL (lol) and other crazy attempts to connect. Clicking around learning the menu, settings, it didn’t really have many games; windows 95 didn’t come with much other than minesweeper and paint. Not being interested much in paint learning about the PC because just something I did. Growing older maybe 8, I wanted to know what the hell makes this grey dusty box function, So I stood in my room shining a flashlight into the side looking into the airholes, trying to see what’s inside. While I didn’t continue to figure out we’re immediately I was interested, it was hard, no internet!

                I remember getting a book, titled like, “how to build a pc” something like that. It talked about every part and the function.  I flipped through the book a lot learning about what everything does, of course with the thought id build my own one day.

In grade 8, I decided it was time to build my pc. I contacted my older cousin Tim, I knew he was tech savy with PCs, and I asked him to help me buy parts to assemble it. I remember it cost me $1000 of my hard-earned money, Dad would often pay me to pile wood or do other jobs. It was a Core 2 Duo, 3 Ghz 4GB ram + nice a nice GPU.  The case was neat, it had a digital temperature gauge on the front and a lot of blue leds. I purchased more blue led fans, come to think of it now it probably looked really silly. It completely lit my room up blue at night

Not having internet started to get to me, living in cottage country others had it but I didn’t, simply wasn’t fair. So having a desktop doesn’t really help has the houses are pretty far away, so my first task was acquire a netbook. Ironic, Very Ironicly the next boxing day, Staples had a sale on netbooks where it would come with a free wifi router. This could not be more key, it was something that just worked out. Since I then had I router + a way to communicate with the router it was time to learn to crack WEP encryption (To my knowledge now, its was like a wet paper bag level of protection). I learned to do this I needed Linux, so I installed Backtrack because it came with the tools needed to crack wifi’s. I learned this on the school computer’s internet! I saved the webpage of the commands and the explanation of the tasks needed to be done do get the passkey to the router. With this information I began testing on my router, I didn’t get it right away. I eventually got it, the real prompt was I was given a magazine for Christmas, Im kinda surprised I was given “2600 hacker quarterly” but hey I was. In grade 8 I got in trouble for trying to bypass the firewall, apparently may have damaged stuff, just to play world of Warcraft. Every Wednesday I knew the school tech guy would work in the server room, so often id pop in and chat. I began trying to help him wherever I could, replacing parts, dusting some out with air(secretly, they couldn’t give compressed air to students? apparently)

Going off to Wilfred Lauirer University I was excited to learn to build program, learn code. Computer Science…. I got this.  Well little did I read there’s only 1 programming class a semester + 4 maths .. including the very hard Mathematical proofs. I stuck it out for 2 semesters doing all the math, while It was possible, it really wasn’t exciting.  Seeing my work / code doing something useful is way more satisfying then solving a pre-solved math problem. With this attitude I switched to Seneca for CPA.

Jumping forward to today, Its my last semester.

My PC no longer has led fans, but its water cooler’s block had RBG lights

I finished my final presentation for an app I planned with a team over 2 semesters. It was a keyboard app for android that would replace your keyboard, that would give you the power to hide messages into images (Steganography) and send them to your friends. Given your friend has the key, they can decrypt and encode it with the keyboard app.

Before my team presented, the prof stood up and told everyone we were the most impressive, ill never forget it.

With this huge confidence boost, my best friend and I nailed the presentation; everyone loved it. There was a great response, lots of questions. After students came and talked to me told me it was great and continued to ask more questions. I was a very rewarding experience.  

Yesterday I got invited to be a collaborator on an Image Steganography library on android, On GitHub. It seems to have a decent about of traffic from searches, so it could be a great way to get my name seen in the security community.

Given my last semester, adventuring into the world of the unknown seems daunting, but I think I’m on the right track!