03 Nov 11 About
Hi there – I’m an IT guy/entrepreneur/programmer living in Northern California. I’m self-taught and have worked in the business since I was 19 years old. After graduating high-school I moved from Florida to California to “make it big” in Silicon Valley. That was in early 2001…right in the beginning of the REALLY hard downturn of the dotcom boom. I ended up taking a decent job doing desktop support and refurbishing computers for a tech-related school (long story…) and eventually left there to work for a small local ISP. I worked there for about 3 months and realized “Hey-I could start a company just like this on my own and make way more money than I’m making here”…so I did.
I left the local ISP and started a competitor in the neighboring town. I still run that company as a side-gig and have learned a LOT over the handful of years I’ve worked there and managed it. Looking back, I was really naive when it came to customers, business, expenses and …basically everything. At the same time-it’s been an awesome experience and I continue to learn new things on a daily basis – both about technology and people (the ‘people’ aspect is a whole other issue). In late 2009 I realized I was “plateauing” at my company and decided to look elsewhere for some new skills and challenges..which is where I work now. My “day job” is currently the Information Systems Manager for a large-ish healthcare company. I live T-SQL…super geeky but I love it.
My affiliations and companies:
Full Spectrum Internet Access: Founded by me and a former co-worker in 2002. Full Spectrum provides dial-up and DSL Internet access, plus on-site and in-house repair services. FS also provides IT Consulting for many local businesses in Grass Valley and the surrounding areas.
BlueDot Networks: My second company, this one exists as an umbrella for a lot of my other ‘single service’ startups such as BlueDot Wifi (Wifi Hotspot Management service; no longer active…has been rolled into other products), Ahsay Billing (online backups billing & CRM SaaS), co-location services, dedicated hosting, Hosted Exchange, wholesale shared web-hosting, etc…
zwoob: My newest startup…still somewhat “in the works” even though it’s online and functional. It’s an online contact card so you can list all of your online “profiles” in one place.
See my LinkedIn profile for more details: http://linkedin.com/in/alrutledge or my profile at http://zwoob.com/aaron for full contact info.
This blog is basically my place to brain-dump information about:
1. IT Tasks and some notes along the way so I can hopefully save someone else some time
2. Business ‘crossroads’ I’ve come to at various points in time
3. Customer/user interaction experiences….there will be many of these to talk about.
Hopefully I’ll be able to impart something constructive to the community at-large. If nothing else, delivering on #3 in the list will be much-needed therapy for me.
