Kei_Go

My first blog post on @x ——————————— Title: Technology and Me By: Daeshawn Ballard ——————————— Technology has truly shaped my life, worldview, network, lifestyle, and ambitions. Let me share with you also some core interactions I’ve had with technology through leveraging my friends, family’s or totals strangers knowledge, Christmas gifts, or that I financed myself (having held a job since 3rd grade); as the son of a nurse/veteran and a barber who grew up in the ghettos of Pittsburgh, PA. I remember: - ⚡️ a family member of mine climbing up a telephone pole and next thing you know, we had every channel on the tv you could think of. This was probably the first hack I ever experienced in my life, I wasn’t even in preschool yet. - 🪢 sitting with my dad around this all in one machine you use a bunch of different wires for to make multiple devices based on FM AM radio technology and ultimately overloading it and making the batteries literally explode in like 3rd or 4th grade lol - 📲 downloading roms and hacking my android phone back in middle school and being in awe of what I had access to after coming from a phone that only had snake and no browser to now a ton of different flash enabled experiences and customization. - 🛜 hacking my android phone again in college to get unlimited mobile hotspot which ultimately made sprint revoke and ban my number because I found a loophole so that they couldn’t charge me extra ( I ended up going a whole summer without a phone, it was actually great). - 📱I loved the jailbreaking of my iPod touch with Cydia (if that’s how you spell it) and modding it to my hearts content in college, exploring all of the new apps and functionality the device was capable of back in 2011. - 🎮 I modded my ps2 slim with duct tape, toilet paper, and a pencil so that I could play japanese releases that I had to go online to read community created english scripts to understand what was happening and hack games that I already had in high school. - 👨🏾‍💻building my first website in high school with html and css which was a bleach anime fan site lol and before that building with BASIC and Visual Basic to make my own contra game, some custom game that was essentially angry birds before it existed, pac man, blackjack, and more. - 💻 fell in love with torrents and getting iso files for technology we couldn’t afford to make music and designs for our album covers, or to make music videos, amongst other things. The world of p2p was a new reality and dimension to explore. - 📀 made a business out of burning and selling movies on blank dvds to support myself through middle and high school (students, staff, even police officers were my customers lol) while I couldn’t maintain my job that I had since third grade ( in which all of the money that I saved up was actually used as a down payment for the house we moved to, getting us out of the hood and me into a better school district, that ultimately led me to getting a full academic scholarship to college). - 👾 using GameSharks for almost all of my gameboy games, and then upgrading to discovering the world of emulators in high school to now being able to play a wide array of games across so many different systems and genres that I would have never been able to afford otherwise. There are countless other stories I have, but all in all I’ve been so privileged to have such an insatiable curiosity and scrappy nature to learn how to maximize the resources around me and expand my horizons thanks to the teachings direction from those around me. I’ve been able to join communities around the world, make lifelong friends, discover so many cool things, and appreciate the world of open source technology, the tools, paradigms, and technology we have today, since I’ve be honored to know technology from a very humble beginnings to what it is now in my own right. I love how much the barriers of entry have lessened, I love that through all of my tinkering and trying things, that people paid me for my insight and skillset so that I’ve been able to support my favorite products, builders, and initiatives in manner in which they deserve, both financially and with my time. Technology has truly shaped who I am and I don’t know what I’d have ever done or who I’d ever be without being exposed to it throughout the years in the manner in which I was. And for that I am forever grateful.

🙏🏾