Justin has been intrigued with computers since a very young age. In Kindergarten, he played Oregon Trail and became addicted. It was love at first sight. He always found himself sitting back in the corner of Mrs. Walls kindergarten classroom on the computer every chance he could get. He never wanted to play with the little cars or anything. He even threw fits when he couldn’t get on a computer because they were all taken by other kids.
His family got their first computer when he was in first grade in 1996 after he played with computers in Kindergarten he picked it right up. He started out by playing Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle on his dad’s old Pentium 386 with 16mb of ram, Windows 95, and a 1GB hard drive. It was a beast and the graphics were INCREDIBLE! His other favorite things to play with on the computer were dig dug, Encarta’s encyclopedia, and Animals!, which was a zoo simulator that showed you pictures of all the animals and even took you through San Diego zoo, all virtually from your computer.
A few years later that computer turned into a hand-me-down that Justin promptly ruined by deleting critical system files that Windows needed to run. Once in a while he would sneak on his mom and dad’s business computer, it never failed that he would mess it up every time he got on it. His dad teased him saying, “son, you must have some kind of weird electrical field in your body because every time you touch my computer, it dies.” It wasn’t very far from the truth either. Every single time his dad would yell, “SON, have you been on my computer?” he’d quickly fabricate a new story about how he was doing something else at the time the computer crashed. To this day, they have no idea why every time Justin would touch their computer, it’d crash. He could do something as simple as type “google.com” and then walk away and it would be crashed to the point of almost losing every bit (no pun intended) of data on the drive.
Before too long, his grandfather moved into the house right below his family’s and bought a webTV. It was 28.8 dial up, but hey, it was ALL his! Justin would go down to his grandpa’s house and spend hour after hour sitting in the living room with his grandfather and deaf uncle while he’d be surfing the web learning everything he could about how things worked.
Late 2001 to early 2002, Justin got his first brand new computer, an HP Brio BA200. Man was that thing sweet, with a 500 MHz Celeron processor, 32 meg of ram, windows 98, and a 4 gig hard drive, he was in heaven. He would NEVER need more power than that. That thing could fly and take any program you’d throw at it like it was nothing. Not too long after he got the computer he got his first racing game and experience with pedals and a steering wheel that plugged in through the gaming port (something no computer has anymore because of USB). It was amazing playing racing games in 3d with that steering wheel and pedals on the floor. Being 12 years old and getting the experience of REALLY driving. Wow!
The only downside to having such an amazing computer was he had no access to internet. So he decided to take up a new talent… wire splicing. This one had some serious repercussions with Pops. It worked out alright for a while, then the phones started shorting out because nothing was spliced right. No electrical tape rapped around the ends, no wire nuts, just bare wires hanging in mid air and Justin HOPING they weren’t going to end up touching. At this time, being 12 years old, his parents didn’t really want him online, but Justin has always been a risk taker when he wants something bad enough. He dialed up, that loud modem dialing those numbers seemed like they were chainsaws running. He sat there, HOPING that his parents wouldn’t wake up from the noise. SUCCESS! HE was online… he promptly turned it off and went to bed though because he didn’t want to get caught.
By this time he was getting online when his parents weren’t on downloading manuals and going to all kinds of computer and technology related web sites. He spent a lot of his time when he was home from school learning the ins and outs of Windows 98. Then something horrible happened, he learned everything he could learn about 98 then 2000 came out and he had to learn something new, something called “NT”. Windows had been completely re-written. Gone were the days of rebooting to install or uninstall a piece of software. The days when you couldn’t just plug a peripheral in and have it work without finding the drivers first. Gone were the days when computers were hard. Justin spent many hours learning the hard way so when Windows XP came out after getting the hang of it, within a few months, Justin was a PRO. He was ready to tackle any computer problem related to the new Operating System. Knowing people in the computer field, he was lucky enough to get an early release. Justin was probably the first adopter of XP in Lewis County.
Not too long after that, he was reading about this new technology called, “Digital Subscriber Lines” on the internet. Desperate to have more speed, he contacted Verizon. He tried EVERY phone number of every family member he knew. Finally, after enough searching, he entered his Aunt Donna’s phone number. “DSL IS AVAILABLE”, the screen read. He jumped for joy and didn’t know what to do. He then got a hold of his aunt and let her know and she was put on the waiting list since they were just implementing the technology in Weston. Justin made sure she was in the first 50 people to get DSL. She was the very first on Cottage Avenue to get it in Weston. From then on, Justin spent every weekend at his cousin, Tiffany’s, house. He downloaded everything under the sun. There was nothing slowing him down. He downloaded several flavors of Linux, tutorial videos of how to do things, everything he could get his hands on.
One day, a miracle happened when he was in middle school. He stumbled upon a book that taught QBasic, the standard of programming at that time. C and C++ were just starting to get really popular at the time. He checked the book out of the RLBMS library and then went back the next day only to find there was a second book on QBasic back in the same section and even a lot of books on computers. He checked almost everyone of them out in the final 2 years he was in middle school. He went by “cybersof” back in those days and even put together a programming team and called it “CyberSoft” nothing ever became of it, but he still has some of the original crew he met on programming forums on his MSN buddy list and chats with them from time to time.
From there, he went on to high school in the top 1% of the LCHS student population that were technology-savvy. Nobody in the high school could outwit him when it came to computers. Teachers had been getting him out of class for years (since first grade in elementary school, actually) to help them with their computer problems. Now, it was the big leagues. He was carrying a shiny new iBook into school and getting on it every time he finished with his classwork and even doing some of his classwork on his computer (most of it actually) he’d type his papers in class and then ask the teachers to allow him to print them that evening and hand them in the beginning of class the next day. Most teachers were pleased to allow him to do it that way. Probably because it was much easier on their eyes than to read his slopping “doctor’s” handwriting.
His junior year in Mrs. Cook’s class he met Michael Minutelli. He found out Michael was really interested in computers just as he was. They became best friends for the remainder of their school career and hung out a lot on weekends at his grandma’s house playing around on the internet. Michael built his first computer which was very impressive to Justin. A dual core opteron rig with maxed out ram and overclocked, at that. Michael was a gamer so he loved that power, and Justin can’t lie, he thought it was pretty awesome playing games on it with their settings maxed out and the thing wouldn’t drop frames.
By this time in high school he decided he was going to Fred Eberle Technical Center in Buckhannon, WV. He went there his junior year for the CISCO Network Academy. He made good grades in it and even competed in the school competition for SkillsUSA. He placed first in that competition and went on to the state level to compete only to not place. It was a hard contest and enterprise-level networking was not his forte, although if he had spent more time on it, he was really catching on quickly. His senior year he decided to go back again. This time, for ARIES Computer Repair and Maintenance. He had a different teacher this year. His previous teacher, Mr. Rob Miller had gone on to teach carpentry. His new teacher this year was young, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Dusty Campbell. Dusty and Justin got along very well. They both complimented each others knowledge in a lot of areas. Justin decided he was definitely going to compete again this year because this was his area of expertise. He was already working with Prestige Housing, Investment Planners, and even Harrison Rural Electrification Association. This made him really confident that he could do well in the contest. Turns out, he was able to get first place in the local competition in Buckhannon and advanced to the next round, STATE COMPETITION, the competition where hundreds of people had competed to get to. It was narrowed down to less than 20 of the brightest I.T. students in the trade schools all across the state. He went in, nervous. He had no idea what was going to be thrown at him. He sat down at his workstation and waited for them to say begin. He turned the paper over and read what he needed to do. He buzzed through the competition, even finding things wrong that weren’t supposed to be and weren’t included in the competition. The judges had problems getting the virtual machines to work correctly to allow the contest to work and he helped them by telling them about problems they had overlooked while keeping his eyes on the screen and working. When the competition was all said and done, at the end of the day, he was the one going to Kansas City, Missouri to compete against the best from every single state in the United States. He couldn’t believe it. What a great ACHIEVEMENT.
A few months later, he boarded the charter bus and began the journey across America to face off against about 50 other students from every other state. This is the place he got his CompTIA A+ IT Technician certification and also finally got tested on his knowledge of computer repair. Never before had anything been so hard, and actually, it wasn’t even so much that it was hard as it was just the simple fact that he was more nervous than he’d ever been in his entire life. “What if I win?”, he thought to himself. His nerves got the best of him and made him not complete a few of the workstations to get to be named, “The number one Computer Repair and Maintenance Technology contestant.” Instead he got an honorable 12th in the nation. Not bad, in the top 24% of all the contestants. Not enough to make him jump for joy, either, though.
So after all that was said and done, Justin decided it was time to put his expertise to good use and help the community. JTekNet was born in July of 2008, only 2 months after graduating high school. JTekNet has been growing since and has served over 200 unique customers in the time it has been in operation with an EXTREMELY low complaint rate and return rate for repairs not working the first time.
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