My life is nothing to brag about. I am a simple 'farm-boy' (compared to most of you) with an affinity toward technical knowledge and electronics. I hail from the foreign land of El Centro, California, slapped in a desert few miles north of the Mexican border and almost equidistant from San Diego (the coastal city) and Colorado (the river, aka the California/Arizona border). It is a rather rual place that may exceed 120ºF in the Summer and may drop below freezing during the winter. In accordance to the definition of a desert, it is a very dry area.

I grew up on a small street aptly named 'Citrus Lane' for its many citrus fruit trees that perpetuated the premesis. It was a small but diverse community of families and personalities (many of which conflicted, but that's another story). Still, it was a great place to live, if I do say so myself, but I have to admit there were various faults in the academic aspect of said commnutiy. Budgets were low, and often spent on popular but menial programs that really had nothing to do with education at all, but were rather stress outlets for the more agressive students that were psychiatric in nature (like, say, the football program). Certainly this benefited those who wanted to purposefully induce braindamage in futile hopes that their salary would be exponentially greater than the thinkers of the land, but for those of us who actually wanted to enhance our thinking capabilities, well, we recieved the short end of the stick and the budget. Needless to say, opportunities for genuine technical learning were few and far between. (No, I'm not bitter.)