My name is Jon Doiron, I'm 25 years old and am a computer enthusiast and gamer based out of Chilliwack, British Columbia. I first gained interest in computers at a very young age when my parents bought their first PC with Windows 95. As soon as I laid my eyes on it I was hooked. It started with Diablo and Doom, then Duke Nukem and spawned into a whole mess of DOS Apogee games (such as games like Bio Menace, Commander Keen, and a host of others). Now, also during this time, I wasn't just restricted to PC, I was also playing games on consoles such as the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo and games like Sonic and Golden Axe and Super Mario World, but my interest was still more towards PC gaming.
As the years went by and I hit middle school, I decided I wanted to learn more about how computers function and enrolled in courses to do with computers. Throughout middle school, I invested time learning about HTML, a bit of CSS coding, some flash and 3D rendering work, and a bit of other basic PC functionality programming. Of course, being in middle school it was mostly just introductory stuff, so to this day I am still reading up and learning new programs and code.
When high school rolled around, I decided that now I know some of the basics of how computers work software wise, I wanted to understand the insides of a computer and how to put one together. In high school, I decided to take courses on A+, Server+, Linux, a bit of Unix, and some of MSCE. I'll never forget the first computer I took apart, which to this day I still have but is unfortunately not functional anymore due to some of the capacitors blowing on the motherboard. The PC was an AMD Socket A Sempron PC with an ASRock motherboard. Since that Socket A system, I've built (either from new parts or spares from old systems) 30+ systems to date into functional systems (most of which were for my own use or my parents). Yes it doesn't sound like a huge number, but considering I do it mostly in my spare time and haven't made a career of it yet, I'm proud of what I've accomplished.
Throughout all this time, I continued to game, playing stuff like Need for Speed, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal Tournament, Rainbow Six 3, Thief and a huge plethora of other games across the years. Yes violence is a big seller in the gaming community, with explosions and fighting, but sometimes it can be good to sit down and enjoy a more peaceful game like Limbo or Braid where puzzles or storyline are so captivating that they really draw you into the atmosphere of the game itself allowing you to invest good time into accomplishing the end goal of that game.
Now some people ask me why I don the nickname of Pliers. There's a few reasons why. One was from an incident I had with one of my friends, but I won't go into that one cause it's a bit personal. However, it mostly spawns from that I always carry a pair of pliers with me wherever I went. And as such, I adopted the name Pliers and use it in almost every game I play both online and offline. Unfortunately since then, the original pair of pliers that I used to own and carry got lost somewhere, and all my replacements to date feel a bit like they're just filling a void as I have yet to own a pair of pliers that were as functional and comfortable as the ones I owned. However, my Leatherman Charge TTI multi-tool seems to do the job quite well and it feels like my old pliers never left. To date, there hasn't been a computer I've worked on that I haven't used pliers to tighten down or pinch something something inside a computer rig.
Computer hardware is something I want to invest my life in some day, considering the amount of knowledge and practical experience I've gained over the years. I will continue to do side work for friends and family, building and fixing systems that need some TLC until the day that PCs are rendered useless (if that should ever happen).
