Who is this Grelmar guy anyway?

My real name is not much of your business, although if you are half tech savvy, a quick WHOIS search will answer that question.

The basics of “Who I am” though, might be interesting to the odd person that floats by here. I don’t know why you’d be interested, but I’ve learned from experience that people are curious to the point of a flaw.

I was born in a small town in Northern Alberta, Canada, to unwed teens, who gave me up for adoption. Because I was born with a heart valve flaw, the government didn’t see me as fit for adoption, so I was put into foster care, where the government promptly forgot I existed for a year and a half while I was cared for by a french family.

For whatever reason, the government remembered my existence, realised I wasn’t likely to die anytime soon, and pulled me my foster parents and placed me with the nice middle class family that raised me. My adoptive father was a bureaucrat for a Crown Corporation, so we floated around the province, and to a lesser extent, the country. Most of my upbringing was in Calgary, which became my default home town.

I was kicked out of public school in Junior High for “entrepreneurial activity” (selling text books, hall passes, passes to the computer lab, etc.), and finished grade school in a small private school, where I learned to despise wealthy, upper class twits.

I put myself through University, studying history, working both for the same Crown Corporation where my father had become a senior executive, and also working nights as a nightclub bouncer. Eventually, I burned out, dropped out, and proceeded to get drunk and stoned until I was around 30. Being somewhat of a polymath, I never found much challenge in making enough money to keep my wastrel of life going. It was during this period that I took a couple of days to teach myself HTML, and proceeded to make quite good money for a number of years as a web designer/developper.

Eventually I sobered up, worked as an electrician’s apprentice for a while, before I settled in to work as a care worker at a homeless shelter, where I was quickly promoted to supervisor. It was an incredibly stressful, challenging, rewarding, and often dangerous job.

After two and a half years working with the homeless, I went back to work in the IT industry.  Currently I work at a small startup that specializes in distributed system virtualization, for use as remote access sandbox labs.

I’m now happily married, with a nice little house and a white picket fence, and a beautiful baby daughter.

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