Chat Room Moderator

Appears in Chat Room as:  warcow105

Mike strives for perfection and tries to help people whenever possible.  He has worked as a satellite dish technician, a locksmith, an alarm/CCTV technician, a flue gas analyzer technician, and an electronics technician for digital wireless mic/reciever systems.

Mike enjoys being a part of the Category5.tv team largely because he enjoys the interaction with a variety of viewers through mediums such as the chat room.  While he greatly enjoys talking "geek" with other knowledgable users, he also finds great satisfaction in helping less knowledgable users with their computer or tech problems.  Mike claims that the thing that drew him to Category5, chat room aside, was Robbie's charisma, humor and knowledge.  He says this "just grabbed me and I realized that this show was different."

Mike is excited to be engaged to be married, and the wedding is planned for August 2009.  He and his bride-to-be plan to start trying for children right away, which has long been a dream for Mike.  Mike is very close with his family and enjoys spending time with them.  Mike has a diverse list of hobbies from computers to electronics, photography to nitro R/C cars, automotive work, video games, and salt water aquariums just to mention a few.

Mike started working with computers back when he was only a few years old.  His parents gave him a Tandy Color Computer II and he spent a lot of time learning the Basic language and how to program.  He later learned how to interface to the printer on the lowest level and made various programs to output graphics to the old dot matrix printer.

His next milestone was when his father brought home an IBM XT.  Mike spent hours upon hours learning everything he could about it: from mastering DOS, to the AT commands for the 1200bps modem.  This is also when he first connected with computers remotely.  The various local BBS's all saw their fair share of Mike.  Inevitably, Mike even set up his own BBS to experiment with.  Many of Mikes skills stem from the time he spent working around the limitations of this XT and his next computer (a 486).

Mike took programming courses in Pascal, C++ and Advanced Placement computer science while in highschool.  Reading the course texts, books from the library and any other material he could get his hands on, Mike flooded himself with knowledge on programming in multiple computer languages.  Community college saw Mike in their computer science program, but he soon dropped out for lack of interest in the courses he was taking.

Since them, Mike has helped friends, family and the occasional client with a variety of tech problems, and he continues to increase his knowledge through reading and participating in programs such as Category5.

With all this computer usage, the inevitable thing happend:  Mike got bored.  Everything became same-old, same-old.  Thats when it happened--he discovered Linux.  Within a month of his discovery, he was running Linux as my main operating system.  Over the years, he have tried many different distributions of Linux, as well as FreeBSD and Solaris.

Mike currently works as an electronics technician at a manufacturer of high-end digital wireless microphone systems and digital audio recorders.

Likes:  good food, dark beer, all types of music, movies, trustworthy friends

Dislikes:  mushrooms, seafood, thieves, liars

Chat Room Moderator

Follow John's Microblog:  [identi.ca]

Appears in Chat Room as:  JohnRobert

John is an IT technician living on the Central Coast in Australia.

John has been working professionally in the IT field for nearly 10 years.  A large amount of his work involves writing and designing web applications.  This involves working with Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP on a daily basis. John is also responsible for designing front ends to the websites using various web standards such as XHTML, CSS2, Javascript and tools such as Emacs and the GIMP.  John's tries hard to use only open source software on open source platforms such as Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian.

John's is also involved in offering support for clients at his offices in the UK and also making sure the office network and machines were running smoothly.

John has always had a keen interest in media since helping out with a pioneering internet radio show for a few years called 'subspace' back in 1996. Since then, other new media such as podcasts, live internet video, video podcasts and blogs have sparked his interest.

Being a relatively new member of the Category5.TV team, John feels Category5 to be a great asset to the community at large, and wants to put something back in after all the help he's received over the years.

John is currently engaged to be married on February the 21st, 2009. He enjoys surfing (the ocean, and the web), drinking beer (all kinds), travelling when possible, going out with his fiancee and staying in with his fiancee watching good movies and TV shows.

John would say he's fairly experienced when it comes to IT work, probably because most of his waking life is spent in front of a computer tinkering with the latest and greatest technologies: His experience began at the age of 4 when his dad sat him down in front of a ZX spectrum computer and started teaching him the ropes. Now, John is still programming from his humble beginnings, but in a world of 100's of computer languages and endless opportunities. John is interested in far too many things to list here.

John works at home (in Australia) for the University of Southampton in the UK, creating web applications for clients.

John is known locally as Herr Komputor by his Australian friends.

Likes: computing and information technology, science, a nice beer, technology in general, curry, community, new media, tinkering, surfing, body boarding, body surfing, the ocean, the sun, everything.

Dislikes: apple inc, microsoft (but not as much as apple), itunes, drm, silly copy protection on dvds he owns, that you wouldn't steal a dvd advert on dvds he owns and paid for, adverts in general on dvds he's bought, lame companies.