Who is this “Gordo” person, anyway?
I was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In fact, other than two years of college, I’ve always lived here. I’m comfortable in the Limestone City, I guess.
It’s hard to imagine, I know, but I was a bit of a strange kid. Very quiet, a daydreamer. I’ve never been a particularly good student, but I managed to get by.
In Grade 10, I discovered photography and for the first time in my life, I had a true calling. I was extremely lucky to be going to a secondary school with not only a strong technical, but arts department as well: not many schools in Kingston had two full equipped darkrooms and the teachers to support them.
Within a year, a good friend and I were running the photography department of the school’s yearbook. We stayed there until graduation: “Where are Gord & Steve? Oh, the darkroom.” ?
Grade 12 was a fateful year for me. Steve and I and two friends decided that a ski trip would be a good idea, so we signed on for one that the Austrian Club was running. It got cancelled and we happened on one being run by another high school and they gave us the last four seats. A word to the wise: if you’ve never skied before, Mont Tremblant QC is not the place to learn. I almost died when I looked out the bus window at this towering mountain that we were supposed to be skiing on.
To make a long story short, after a day of reasonably success getting my feet under me, I got a bit over confident and took a run too quickly. I wiped out on an icy patch and spun into a snow fence, partially tearing two ligaments in my knee. The good news: I met my lovely wife Bridget on the bus on the way home. We wound up sitting across the aisle from each other and after her chatty friend stopped talking my ear off, Bridget and I chatted the rest of the way home. The rest, as they say, is history: we were married 3 ½ years later.
So, off to college I went. In 1988, there was one choice for photojournalism training in Canada: Loyalist College in Belleville, (about 45 minutes down the road). What a great place to learn and meet people. Because Loyalist was it, we had students from all across the country. A number of my classmates managed to go on to big things, but while I knew what to do and how to get the shot, I was a terrible student and didn’t finish the program. Man, I wanted to, but it just wasn’t in me. It’s probably just as well: the bottom fell out of the economy in general, and the newspaper business in particular, in late 1990. New jobs were few and far between and they paid like crap, anyway.
I did work that spring for a local weekly newspaper, but after a terrible experience at a multi-fatality highway accident and some serious soul-searching, I realized that I didn’t want to chase ambulances for the rest of my life and quit my job. I got a job writing for a small business magazine that summer, but it didn’t last.
Thankfully, I had a fallback: computers. Mom and Dad bought us a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1982 and I was hooked. Somehow, I managed to talk my way into a job running a mainframe computer for a local database company.
Computers have been my bread butter and the bane of my existence ever since. Well, except for a five-year stint in the darkroom of the Queen’s Department of Medical Photography. I’ll tell you no stories other than it takes about a week for your stomach to stop churning when you pull the autopsy films out of the processor to check. ? Oh, and prison inmates have some nasty ways of killing each other.
These days, I work in the Physics Department at Queen’s. I’m the departmental geek, but they insist on call me System Administrator. Whatever works, I guess. I look after somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 computers on a daily basis. We’re about 80% linux or I’d have to be three people. As it is, life gets pretty hectic. Not bad for someone with not a stitch of training in computers, eh? I’m self-taught all the way.
Life is good: Bridget and I have been married since 1991 and we have two boys: Philip (1997) and Cameron (2004). She’s a travel consultant with one of the biggest agencies in town and we periodically get to travel to expand her knowledge. It’s not free, though. Suppliers don’t give away trips much any more.
We have the great privilege of going to: Venezuela, Cuba (twice), the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Malaysia, and El Salvador. Visiting other cultures is the only way you can truly know yourself. Broaden your horizons and you can have more educated opinions on world events. I have no respect whatsoever for someone who claims to know the world’s problems but has barely left their own backward. It that’s judgemental, so be it.
I’ve been blogging since May 2005. Not long by any measure, but it’s a lot of fun. I actually started doing this as a way to exercise my withering writing skills and to cut down on the junk that I had been emailing my friends. I’ll post it to the world, instead!
That’s it for the moment, feel free to email me at gordothegeek@gmail.com