... Halifax educated

So when we left our hero (Me. I'm your hero) he was back in Minto, getting ready for university. As we all know, 17 years old is the best time to lock yourself into a career path for the rest of your life. I mean, it's not like a few years ago your dream was to be a cowboy or a ballerina. You're mature!

I toyed around with a lot of things. Lawyer, pharmacist, yes even priest at one point. Nothing much stuck, so I guess like all people who were confused and not ready to hit the world, I chose teaching. I applied to an was accepted to Dalhousie University, and I was going to do a double major in History and Mathematics. I was in an advanced math class in high school, and the Dal math department had sent me a letter inviting me to join the honours math programme. It was my very first class on my very first day:

Professor: So, let's start with a basic concept. Let's discuss paradoxes. Can anyone name a paradox?

Arms shoot up all over the place, and I just look around bewildered.

Student: Well, there is the (to this day I can't remember what he said, it wasn't Heisenberg but I think it had to do with graphing).

Professort: Eiiiin...that WILL do, although it's a little basic.

Me: under my breath Oh man oh man oh man, this is a bug hunt! Game over!

I'd like to say things got better after that, but they did not. I thought I could hack it, but I couldn't. When we got our first tests back, I got an A-. I was quite impressed, until he said:

I mark on a pretty steep curve. If you got anything under an A, you should wonder why you're here.

So I dropped out of math, that dream quashed.

At the same time I was struggling with my English class. I was okay, but not quite getting it. My ideas seemed good, but they were just bubbling below the surface. The professor was an eccentric named Deverandas P. Varma, and while I admired his lectures I could not figure out what he wanted from me. That was until I had to write a paper on MacBeth about the relationship between Lady MacBeth and the Scotsman himself. I was looking at my blank sheet of paper, compiling my notes when the word symbiotic jumped into my head. I quickly scribbled a few notes down and hit the stacks, looking for instances of this in discussion on MacBeth. The paper just started flowing, and ironically enough I never used the word symbiotic in it anywhere, but it broke through a ceiling. I got it, and then I was pulling down straight As in the class.

That's when I knew: my majors would English and History. Particularly Russian history. Soviet era stuff.

Doing my honours degree, I came across the second prof who would have a great impact on my life: Dr Trevor Ross. His 18th Century Lit seminar was a literal romp, finding all the subtext and ribaldry of the era. The focus on satire and experimentation in that age really struck a chord with me, and it became my passion (I've lost count over the years how many papers and discussions I've had about Gulliver's Travels, and I think it ranks up there with the number of papers I've written on Othello. And yes, the rumors are true: I've read Nineteen Eighty-Four far more times than what one would consider healthy!).

During this time I got a got computer to write my papers on. A real, honest to goodness, Windows 3.1 running PC, along with a printer. Not to sound like a Yorkshireman, but what you have today with USB is luxury. Pretty much back then you had to find out what type of printer you had, what type of PC you had, what software you were going to run and then go into the actual printer and flick some switches to let the printer know what type of data to expect. And then you had to make sure the computer knew the printer was there, which might involve turning them on in a particular order. And then you had to load the paper, which was a pain. And then print...and stand there, and keep the paper straight and fix any paper jams. It was not fun, but it was educational. Then I got a modem. I found I was spending more time tuning my computer and fixing things on it than I was writing about The Canterbury Tales (Whan in Aprille soers shorte...)

I discovered I liked the binary settings of computers: Either something worked or it didn't. You could argue for ages that Phillip Roth's The Conversion of the Jews was about his love of cherry pie, and you could be as valid as a real opinion. But the certainty of seeing a piece of text that I generated on a screen was more thrilling. Plus, it was 1994: Soviet history had ended 2 years before, and 18th Century Lit had petered out around the time of the Victorians. So I went to a technical school for computers, and took programming and networking.

I also fell in with a group of real eccentrics. There were science fiction nuts, fantasy nuts, political people, actors, djs, musicians, writers, and me...the guy who had his own place, so we could all play cards. It was like a French salon, only not.

For a lark I taught myself HTML and set up my own home page. When I finished school I actually did teach for a few months...and failed at that. But I found that HTML people were in great demand. And one such set of people were willing to hire me over the phone and then move me out to their office....in Toronto.