Andrew Haff Technobiography

Growing up, we were not allowed to have console games. So my first experience with technology, besides occasional team-games at friends’ houses, was with my dad’s work laptop. It was there the rules against video games became weakened.

I cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D and Dark Forces. Yes, I indeed liked this technology thing. It was years before my mom allowed us to have a “family” computer and I have been making up for lost time ever since. I was on AOL, unfortunately it was one of the few games in town, before instant messaging, and was astounded when they brought it out. As a matter of fact, e-mail was rather new when I started and that was exciting too.

Most of my friends did not have e-mail addresses then, and so I had little reason to learn how to type. It was not until late High School that I took a class and finally weaned myself off of hunting-and-pecking; something I now look on with disdain. A few years later I taught myself the dvorak keyboard and have never considered going back.

All of my love for technology comes through games and making computers better for them. I first started my tech tweaking with cleaning up junk files, exciting, and installing the newest anti-adware software of the day: “Spybot Search and Destroy”! From there I have learned how to do a lot of useful things and a number of not-so-useful ones. This culminated with my “building” my own computer in college.

All of the events so far happened before I regularly used a cell phone. After many years of occasionally carrying one in case of emergencies, I moved off campus. Now that I did not have a phone in my room, I was forced to use the dreaded machine that had so often annoyed me before. From there it was a downhill slope leading to my concession, due to the pressure from friends, to text more often than I call. Without a doubt, I will eventually be checking e-mail from my phone and running virus scans to prevent my call list from being sent to millions of telemarketer agencies. Oh the future…

On a side note, since nearly everything in our lives can be considered technology, I built a trebuchet (the cutting-edge of medieval siege weapons in the 13th century) the other day, and now terrorize the neighborhood with flying Hershey’s Kisses.