Hi everyone.

My name is George, and I am writing to you from beautiful Melbourne, Australia. This site is just my personal blog where people who I know and don’t, are able to see a glimpse of my life and what I do in this world.

I am a web developer by trade, and work for the web development company Efront, located in Melbourne’s CBD. I love doing what I do, and am always trying to find new and more efficient ways of doing things. I mainly program in PHP (some may think that efficient and PHP don’t go together in the same sentence, but I believe so!) and MySQL, and have experience in a range of other programming languages.

I have been using computers nearly all my life. Our family received our first computer in 1988 — it was a Commodore Amiga 1000. I mainly played games on this machine, however it did pique my interest in all things digital and computing in general. I received my first taste of actual computer programming during Year 7 at my local high school, where I spent lunch times in the IT classroom programming in LOGO on the school’s Apple IIe‘s. My IT teacher at the time, Ms. Oh, encouraged my budding interest in computer programming, and it was this encouragement that has brought me to where I am today.

I graduated from RMIT University in 2004 with a Degree in Software Systems Engineering Honours, and by that stage I was well versed in C-based languages, and had an interest in web development, particularly using PHP. After landing a position at Optus Internal Administration as a Web Application Developer and Technical Support, I was exposed to the Apple Mac and the OS X operating system. Needless to say, soon after that initial moment of exposure, I had switched from my Windows XP-based computing to the Mac platform, and have stayed ever since.  The real beauty about this experience was that I was able to use OS X on a daily basis as a “try-out” without having to purchase anything yet. Once I was happy with the OS X platform, only then did I outlay the funds to switch back at home.

For a period of 2-3 years I also ran my own consulting and development agency with a very dear friend called aCore Solutions, until I discovered that I was spending more time running a business than actual development (my real passion), and decided to move back into the workplace.

I have owned many computers in the past. The following is a list of them in chronological order, albeit not an exhaustive one:

  • Commodore Amiga 1000 (Motorola 68000 CPU, no hard drive, 800KB double-density floppy drive, 256KB RAM upgrade up to 512KB, Kickstart 1.3)
  • Commodore Amiga 2000 (Motorola 68000 CPU, 1MB RAM, Kickstart 2.0, upgraded to Kickstart 2.1, 2.1GB IBM SCSI hard drive, 8MB fast RAM + 2MB chip RAM, 2x SCSI CD-ROM drive)
  • NEC 80286 PC (10MHz, 640KB RAM, 1.2MB 5.25″ floppy, 20MB MFM hard drive, EGA graphics, MS-DOS 4.01, MS Windows 3.0)
  • Non-descriptive 80286 PC (12MHz, 1MB RAM, 1.44MB 3.25″ floppy, 40MB IDE drive, VGA graphics, MS-DOS 6.22)
  • Custom-built AMD 80386 DX-40 (40MHz, 85MB IDE hard drive, MS-DOS 6.22, MS Windows 3.11, Microsoft mouse (!), VGA graphics)
  • Custom-built Cyrix 6×86 PR200+ (64MB RAM, 2.5GB hard drive, Windows 95 OSR2 (then Windows 98), Diamond Monster Sound II sound card)
  • Custom-built AMD K6-II (450MHZ clocked, 128MB RAM, 4GB hard drive, Windows 98)
  • Custom-built AMD Athlon 1800XP+ (clocked at 1533MHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, ATI Radeon 9600XT/256MB video card, Windows XP SP2)
  • Apple 15″ Aluminium Powerbook G4 (1.67GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 80GB hard drive, 8x SuperDrive, running Mac OS X Tiger) – now a hand-me-down to a relative
  • Apple 15″ MacBook Pro (2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 6x SuperDrive, running Mac OS X Leopard) – still using this machine
  • Apple PowerMac G4 Quicksilver (733MHz G4 CPU, 256MB RAM, 80GB hard drive, Zip Drive (remember those?!), headless) – eBay machine ;)
  • Commodore Amiga 1200 (Motorola 68EC020 25MHz CPU upgraded to 68030 33MHz through trapdoor expansion card, 500MB 2.5″ IDE hard drive, 8MB fast RAM + 2MB chip RAM, SCSI interface, built in PCMCIA adapter runs 3Com ethernet card) – still have this machine
  • Apple Mac SE/30 (Motorola 68030 25MHz CPU, 80MB hard drive, 1.44MB SuperDrive, 10BaseT ethernet card connected via its PDS slot) – still have this machine
  • Apple Mac Mini Late 2007 model (2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 120GB hard drive, 500GB Time Machine drive) – daily use machine

You can find me on social networking sites such as Twitter (twitter.com/georgeharito) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/georgeharito).