Biography of Erik Westlake
My name is Erik Westlake. I am 27 years old. I have been happily married for 8 years and I have two beautiful daughters. I work for my families company which is called Westlake Industries Inc. I have worked there for three years now as Manager, Shared Services . I work out of the head office in Burlington, Ontario. The company is a pipe fabrication company which recently hit the Canada Hot 50 Profit, placing 12th overall.
I have been on computers since I was 3 years old. The first computer I owned was an IBM Compatable 80386 with 256KB RAM and 80MB Hard Drive Space on it. This was running DOS. This was back in 1985. This started my interest in computers and by the time I turned 8 years old, when my uncle got us a new computer which was a Pentium I 90MHz, So began my interest in the inner workings of computers. Since that I have come a long way indeed. When I turned twelve years old I delved into the hardware aspect of computers, building my first computer. This taught me a lot about how everything communicates with each part of the computer and what each piece is vital for. Since then I have built countless machines, rebuilding them as well. This sparked my interest in computers and what they can do.
Then came gaming. I started playing MMORPGs when I was about 14 years old. I did this for countless hours while whittling away on how other parts of computing worked. This gave me insight into the aspects of computing that most people today use, the power vs gaming ratio. This basically shows what is "required" to run the game and shows that this is not the truth of the matter. I learned a lot about the inner workings of computers during this time in my life.
In high school I began to get a small interest in programming (which partially passed in a few years). I started where most did with BASIC. I worked in BASIC and Visual BASIC for a few years in school programing. Then started into C++ and lost my interest in the software side of computing and decided to take on Networking.
Thus started my College career. I took Network Administration at Mohawk College and loved most parts of it. This started my love of the Linux Operating System. I learned quite a lot here, and the teachers were eager to give me pushes in the right direction when I had a challenge I wanted to tackle. All in all I learned a great deal that I still use to this day.
Now Lets talk about some of the operating systems I have had experiance with.
Linux: I love it, though rarely use it. Being and administrator of a Windows Network it is hard to find time to tinker in Linux. This is where my VPS comes into play. I have a VPS where I host this site along with a few others which I do for fun. This is running CentOS and quite a few basic tools run on this as well. I have a lot of experiance in working with BIND9 and DNS setups though not the best at it I am compident enough. I tinker around attempting to better the system all the time. Lots of labour is placed into the system and lots of knowlege is gained.
Windows: What can I say about Windows? It is a necessity of the business world right now. I am not the greatest fan of it, but until more people become computer compedent in the world, we are stuck with it. However, Windows is not all bad. There are some great points in it, but I will not get into them here.
I have also begun to delve into Web Programming languages, like PHP and PERL. This came and I have begun my work with this custom CMS which you are seeing my page on. It does not look totally like a CMS, however it is. I have coded it by hand and it is drawing from MySQL Databases. I work constantly on bettering my systems, programming and design aspects of the web world.
This gives you a basic overview of my life in computers. Stay tuned for more information on other parts of my life, or check out my Blog for more information.
Thank you for reading,
Erik Westlake