At this time, I was introduced to Dominick Williams, a really good friend of mine, even to this day. Dominick is a genius when it comes to networking, coding, and the whole nine yards. From taking over accounts back in the America Online (AOL) and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) days to developing scripts and tools on the fly… just an impressive amount of things were going on at the time.

And this is where things took a major turn for me as a kid. The more I hung around Dominick, the more my passion for technology and computers grew.

After a very short period of time, I actually became quite addicted to the computer. Where most kids get addicted to gaming (I did at some point too), watching cartoons, playing outside, etc., I started wanting to spend more and more time on the computer and learning some of the things that he knew.

The things that teachers were talking about in school started becoming extremely boring. Unless it was computer class, I was uninterested in what the teachers had to talk about. You know you’re a little different when all of your friends ask you how’s it possible to fail physical education classes—that was boring too. I wanted to learn more about computers!