About

This is the personal blog and catch all blog of me, Josh Miller.  Over time, this blog has always pretty much just been a place to put whatever I feel like posting and I’ve since made it into an archive of blogs I’ve killed over the years.

I’ve been posting and writing online since roughly 1997/98 and have been using computers for many years before that.  From a Commodore 64, through DOS and Windows 1.1, through Windows 3.0 to Windows 8, Linux and Mac.  Technology has been a part of my life from pretty much when I was born.  I’ve always loved to create things and I’ve always loved using technology to create things.

I wrote simple basic programs using some simple syntax my dad taught me around 1988.  My friends and I started making simple one page video game themed news letters when we were like nine or ten.  When I learned how to dial in to BBS systems it was the most incredible thing ever.  The ability to chat with someone through the computer, someone miles away was amazing.

Soon after I started using the internet I created my first website, The Chaos Xone, on Geocities, which would eventually, evolve from a webpage I would manually update with periodic news entries, into a reviews website and blog called Lameazoid.com.  I taught myself HTML and made crummy simply artwork that I’d scan and color in MS Paint for the site.

Eventually I got my first experience with an actual blog platform with Livejournal.com.  Eventually I outgrew Livejournal and upgraded to writing on WordPress.  I’ve created and killed dozens of blogs on topics from Politics to Video games to Photography to Technology to Second Life.

I’ve always loved to write as well, mostly.  Aside from those simple newsletters of 1990, I’d write simple short stories.  Often these would just be the plot of a game in text format.  I’d always enjoyed writing short stories but once again, the internet helped push my interest in expressing opinions and ideas in text online.  Some of the earliest reviews I’ve written were done for alt.toys.transformers.  The early Chaos Zone had dozens of short quickie 1 paragraph reviews.  I’ve always tried to keep with a relatively short format for reviews, it helps with the attention span problems plaguing the world these days.

Somewhere in the mid 90s, after watching an episode of Beast Wars, having no idea what it was, and watching Optimus Primal get killed at the end of Other Voices and assuming “Boy, he must have been a nobody”, I got interest in Transformers.  I’d been collecting Star Wars toys, mostly Micro Machines, but I decided to try out Beast wars Quickstrike.  This lead to an interest that would last for many years and have a pretty strong influence on my interests and life for many many years and eventually spawning a collection that probably peaked at some point around 1000 figures but is quite a bit smaller these days.

Eventually, after high school, in 1998, I moved on to college, like many folks do.  My choice of major pretty much came down to three choices: Journalism, Computer Science, and some kind of Engineering.  I had an interest in Journalism stemming from my interest in writing.  Unfortunately for that major, my opinion was that it is a field that is hard to make any money with, and maybe to some extent, I could see the writing on the wall for the news industry with the dawn of the internet.

Computer Science would make sense with my interest in technology, but this was right as the Tech bubble was growing huge and it was obvious to me that by the time I graduated, CS majors would be a dime a dozen.

Then there was Engineering.  I had taken 3 years of Engineering Drafting and 1 year of Architecture in High School, those classes were my most favorite classes in school.  in a close second were classes like Engineering Technology, Wood Shop, and Metal Shop.  So I chose a path of Mechanical Engineering.  Five and a half years and three school later, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering degree.  It was a lot of math and a lot of physics based work (I love physics) and now i was ready for work…

… which wasn’t real easy to find.  It turns out Engineering, like many fields actually, has a bit of a catch 22 built into it.  For the most part, in order to get a job in Engineering, most places want you to have “5 years experience+”.  So I got an interim job doing inventory for a company called RGIS.  While working for RGIS I met the woman who would eventually become my wife.

I also got hooked up through a coworker who’s husband was looking for an “Assistant Engineer” at a local television station.  Despite that he thought I was way over qualified for the job, he hired me and thus, I became a “Broadcast Engineer”.  Despite that working at RGIS was pretty much hell, two great things came out of it in the end.

Working in television was pretty exciting.  The job was pretty much just fix problems that come up in the equipment or with the office computers, and it was always something different.  Eventually I’d move on from working at the television station to my current employer, though I still work in television.