Welcome!

Welcome to Cyberpunk Today. My name is Brian, and after about two years of debating, I finally decided that this idea merits a blog. Cyberpunk Today is born of an idea that concepts form 1980's cyberpunk fiction and role playing games are becoming reality. The view of a dark, pre-apocalyptic near future is coming true, and is both scary and exciting. If you need some background, I'd suggest William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to get you started. Also check out R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 (and the original Cyberpunk 2012 if you can find a copy) and WizKids' Shadowrun role playing games. As for myself, here is some background: I started seriously playing with computers in the mid 1980's with a Commadore 64. I brought my second computer, a C64-C to college in 1990. In January, 1991, I discovered the Internet via my school's 56K dedicated UUCP connection through UU.Net. At the time I was working from the computer lab, where they had a bank of real vt100's connected to their Unix and VAX VMS servers. Shortly after I got my second apartment in my post-senior year, I got my first PS, a 486DX2-50 laptop with a whopping 8MB of RAM, a 350MB hard drive, and a 14.4Kbps modem. This is when I discovered dial-up shells and BBS systems. Shortly after that, I made some major mistakes in life and re-started life in the computer field in the early spring of 1999, working for a local regional ISP, TIAC. Thus, I began a career just as the big tech bubble was showing signs of bursting. TIAC was bought out 8 months later. I then went to work for ZipLink, a national, wholesale ISP which supplied the services for many "virtual ISPs" like Yahoo, K-Mart, NetZero, and a myriad of mom-and-pop operations. We supplied dial up connections to over half a million end users by the time the company went out of business almost exactly a year later. Next, I was off to start consulting with Universal Data Stream. UDS was, and is a great place to work. They supplied local, on-site, outsourced IT services, mostly for New England microchip manufacturers and other small, tech companies. And they were the first place to pay me a wage above the lowest 25th percentile. These were the Good Times. But the bubble burst and UDS couldn't keep enough contracts to keep everyone on board. They laid off everyone but the owners. With the economy in shambles, it would be another year plus, before I was employed again, and I still haven't made that much money even though I'm still improving my skills. While at ZipLink, I had created my own web hosting company with a couple friends, called DataSquire. It was DataSquire that kept me busy, if not actually employed during the down time, and kept my skills fresh. In September, 2003, I started a new contract position doing tech support. The company was great but really wasn't a good fit. They needed tech support and a tech writer and I needed something that paid a little better and more in the IT or System Administration area. The commute to the far side of Boston was a nightmare. Some days, I could make it, speeding like a bat out of Hell, in 35 or 40 minutes. Other days it took two and a half hours. As a result, there was no way I could make it there at the same time every day, so I began to be phased out through telecommuting. In January, 2004, I was out looking for a new job before I was let go completely. By this point, I knew my contract wouldn't last long, so I was looking for a life jacket before the boat sank. I was lucky to find a company I had interviewed with a few years previous, and they hired me on for a 6 month trial contract. The deal was that I'd give them 6 months at half what I should be making and they'd guarantee me 6 months of paid work. Ahh, the things I do for job security. So as I start this blog, it's been 10 months and I'm still making half pay as a contractor. The company still hasn't gotten their needed capital and is squeeking by on what they can. It's a shame really, as they're already making an income, burning their capital slowly, and have a solid business. They just need a boost to expand and get completely in the black. So here I am, telecommuting again, and working for peanuts. Three things give me solace at the moment:

1. The company gave me a title: Systems Manager.
2. I have a job in the first place.
3. No other qualified person would work for this little.

These make the job a little more secure than it could be. The fact that I continued without a pay raise for the last four months is a testiment to how crappy the job market is for a self-taught, cross-platform system administrator and all around IT geek. Besides, after almost 6 years in the industry, this is the first company that looks like it has potential to be really big. The executives have all seen the bubble burst, just as I have, and we've all been burned. This company is built on a solid foundation, good cash flow management, and, like DataSquire, the ability to operate on a shoestring till the income improves. So that's me. Expect some tech punditry, rants and raves, links to state of the art in technology, and other essays and things in the future.