Steemit has a new Geek - My Introduction!

Well hello Steemit, it's great to be here and to be a part of this. Let me introduce myself, my name is Matt Graham, I am 45 years old, happily married to my best friend and I am a tech Geek. I am also the proud father of 4 boys and grandfather to one awesome little girl.

A brief history —I first started in computers back in the mid 80's when I got my first CoCo3 from Radio Shack. From that point on I was hooked. I built my first PC/XT in the late 80's. I remember Dos 3.1 - 6.22 as well, as I have used every Windows version from 286 - 3.11 - win10. And yes, I was a hold out when Win 95 came around, I just didn’t trust an operating system that had an uninstall feature back then. Also, it made SoftICE kind of tough to use at first. I also remember spending days downloading some of the first versions of Red Hat and Slack. Also, let's not forget about all those wonderful things we used back before the web like telnet, FTP, Archie, Gopher, Usenet News Groups and the IRC. Those were the original Social Networks. I even ran several BBS's back in the day. In the late 90's I was part of a Cracking Group called MexElite and we created the IRC channel on EFNET #Cracking4Newbies. My handle back then was _CbD_ and even still today if you search for "_CbD_ ME/C4N'97" you can find some of my cracking tutorials —just keep in mind I was a young fella back then and software was a whole lot different. I also helped on a little project called AOHELL back in the day that exploited AOL, for those who remember that one.

Around that same time, the late 90's, my father and I started a website for his interests, which at the time were "Hunting, Shooting, Fishing and Boating" —we called it "Graybeard Outdoors" or GbO for short. It started out as a simple blog type site with articles he had written. My father also had created one of the most extensive links list around those interests, so we added it for content and the site began to see lots of traffic due to his links. We then added forums and the site exploded and quickly grew to 1 + million page views a month. At the time we were not monetizing it in any real way, but quickly saw the benefits once we did. At the sites peak, around 2008, we were seeing 1+ million page views per week. We had servers Colo'ed in Dallas, Tx and in Atlanta, Ga. We also offered Hosting services for many of the outdoor forums sites in those days. During that same peak the GBO Network consisted of over 30 sites offering services such as email, picture hosting, short URL, forums hosting, site design and most anything that went along with it. I was the sys admin for all 8 of our servers and the countless number of VPS's on them. Around 2012 I had grown tired of the constant attention that was required to maintain the network we had created. In 2013 we sold to one of our advertisers. My father stayed on as the face of the company as he had always been, for a salary of course, and is still there today. I took my share of the money and opened a print shop doing large format printing, vinyl, and screen printing. I did this in a little Alabama town that could not support the business, so after about a year I shut it down. I then went back to installing CCTV and Network camera systems which I had done off and on part time for several years.

I later gave the printing equipment to a close friend to see if she would have better luck than I did with it, she did. She managed to create a successful ECO friendly Screen Printing business. Fast forward a few years and in August of 2016 I loaded up my truck and left Alabama with no real destination in mind. I stopped for the night in east Tx at a small motel. When I entered the lobby the owner of the motel was fighting with his DVR trying to get logged in to no avail. I offered to help and he gladly accepted. It was a cheap ebay DVR, and if you have ever bought one of those you know the default password will most likely be 1234, 12345, or 123456. Well, I tried 12345 first and that was it. The owner was so happy he gave me a free room for the night and told me to come see him in the morning. I did, and he had much more work that he needed done. I spent about a week there fixing all the things that he came up with. He then called another motel owner who came down and met with me.

The other owner, Dilip Patel, has proved to be one of the greatest men that I have met in a long time. I stayed with him for a year working on anything at his motel that needed it. When I didn’t have anything to do he would call other hotel/motel owners and find me work. From converting signs to LED or any other LED conversions —I have done it for a hotel at some point. I have converted many hotels over to tank less water heaters from old boilers. I even spent a weekend in Dallas at a Hampton Inn just fixing TVs.

Then, in July of 2017 I talked that close friend I gave the printing equipment to into coming to visit me in Texas. She did, and I managed to talk her into marrying me on that same visit. So I am once again in the printing business, but this time with my best friend.

Before I forget to mention…I have owned several Retail PC Shops over the years and built thousands of PC's, although these days it is just not as fun as it once was for me. Today my tech interests are geared more towards automation systems with PLC's or even better MCU's. Most of my recent projects have been built using the ESP8266 and ESP32 MCU, and are targeted towards information gathering & sensor monitoring for hotels/motels.

How did I first hear about Steemit? That’s easy @adamkokesh in one of his Youtube videos back in September or October of 2017.

Why did I join? Because my wife @rebeccagraham told me to… nah just kidding, but she is the reason I joined. Now we share yet another aspect of our lives.