The IT Nerd

This morning, awoke to find this question in my inbox from New Zealand:

I am also a self confessed nerd and lover of gadgets and all things tech. I really like your blog and your honest and down to earth online presence and attitude towards your customers. I have a (very) small side business in my hometown offering in home desktop support and training and would love to expand and maybe turn it into my main business.

I have a Tertiary Diploma in IT (Networking) and experience with windows, linux and mac desktops.

If you don’t mind I would like to ask you a few questions;
1. How did you get started in IT?

2. How do you approach the vendors/retail outlets when asking to review their products?

3. What do you think is the best way to keep abreast of new consumer tech?

Thanks for the questions and I hope the weather is great in New Zealand. In terms of the answers to your questions:

1. I’ve had access to computers or owned them since the early 1980’s. What made me believe that this could be a career for me is that even as a 13 or 14 year old, I was always asked to fix other people’s computers, teach them to use their computers, or write software for them. That in turn sent me to university for a computer science degree. The rest as they say is history.
2. This is a funny question as 80% of the time, vendors approach me to review their products, and that can become “interesting” to manage. But when I do reach out to a vendor to ask them to review one of their products, I explain about what the site is about, the reach I have on the site itself and on Twitter, and the types of reviews that I have posted. That usually is enough to at least get a discussion going.
3. I find the best way to keep abreast of new consumer tech is to read everything. I am constantly reading various tech sites and my Google Alerts does a good job of serving up the latest tech stories. It also helps that I get invited to a lot of product launches as that helps me to see what’s going to be big in the tech world.

I hope that answers your questions. But if you have any more or you need a point clarified, just drop me a line!

This entry was posted on November 4, 2014 at 6:10 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.