Teckyhead is Gary Smith (that’s me!), born in Ceduna, South Australia and raised in Ballarat, Victoria. His parents, John Amos Smith and Lorraine Anne Smith (nee Harper) divorced when he was a little over 1 year old, so he and his sister were raised by their mother and saw their father from time to time and spoke to him on the telephone every year on birthdays and Christmas day. I also stayed with him and his other family for a week or so in Sunbury when I was in my early twenties.

Anyways, I always had an interest in anything that was powered by electricity and when I was around 14 or 15 I met John Schellens. I was talking on a CB radio that was connected to an old 12 volt electric train set controller and John explained the evils of half wave rectified power on DC powered CBs and offered to sell me a power supply. That was really the beginning of a life changing period for me. John was everything that I probably would have liked to be. He was a bit of a neat freak but besides that he was always very honest, very giving of his time and in the field of electronics he was just a marvel to watch. Incredibly meticulous and neat with everything that he built. I remember when he designed and built a speaker phone well before they were available in Australia. He built it from scratch – from the actual circuit diagram to drawing out the circuit on a  circuit board and dipping it in acid. John also sparked my interest in computers. He bought a microbee computer in kit form in the late 70′s and then later on he had a TRS-80 I think. He was a great friend and mentor during an important period of my life. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in around 20 years but I’m sure our paths will cross again sometime.

I lost most of the years between about 1985 and 1995. What I mean by lost is that I let them slip by without really taking much notice of what I was doing. I know that I was programming, running an online bulletin board and going to university but I just kind of let those years slip by and don’t remember much other than the birth of my daughter in 1990. I’ve since learned the importance of ‘getting from the day’ rather than just ‘getting through the day’. It’s too easy to let life slip by and to think back on a period of 10 or 15 years and not really remember much of what happened is just a little unpleasant. You never get those years back so make sure you accumulate all the good times and memories!

For the past 15 years I’ve been a small business owner, IT consultant, ISP and freelance PHP developer. For the next chapter in my life I’d like to do some public speaking and life coaching. There’s so much more that you can get out of life if you just take a little time to stop and think about who you want to be, where you want life to take you… and then involve yourself in the activities that can bring those things about.