Hello world!

Hello, my name is Derek Inman. I live in Coos Bay, OR and work for a healthcare company as an IT Systems Specialist. I have a cat named Reno and my hobbies include data archiving and movies. My hobbies usually require a bit of an explanation. For data archiving, I find and store information from the Internet on a wide variety of topics which include videos, images, documents, etc. I like to think of it as being a collector but instead of limiting myself to one topic, I collect everything. I also have the strange skill of being able to easily memorize information related to movies and have collected roughly over 4000 DVDs and Blu-rays.

I got started with computers when I was a small child and have always wanted to work with them. I used to focus on programming but at some point it stopped being as much fun when I wasn’t making things for myself anymore. My primary focus then switched to a different level of abstraction and I focused more on desktops, servers, and software. This is where I once again had more fun since I could still create things with ingenuity but I was no longer tied down to trying to find missing semicolons in a million lines of code.

I have had a strange college career. I started in Humboldt State but had to leave to help my family. I then got an Associates degree in computer science from Southwestern Oregon Community College. I went to OSU for a few years but ran out of funding and now I take classes sponsored by my current employer. Through my employer, as a part of my continuing education, I was able to earn over 20 certifications with it being a part of my responsibilities. I’ve played with a lot of programming languages throughout the years and I have 3 clear favorites though they aren’t favored by most or have been deprecated in some way. I especially like Java, Visual Basic, and HTML/XHTML.