Site icon NuAngel.net

About NuAngel

Welcome to NuAngel.net. I, Garrett “NuAngel” Culver registered this domain somewhere in the neighborhood of 1999. I let it expire in 2005 while I was a college student who couldn’t find $20 to renew it. Seriously. $20. I was broke.

After repeated offers to buy it back from multiple domain squatters, failed attempts at back orders, and even offering more money than I actually had to get it back – the morons who said I never offered them enough put it up for auction with a starting bid of just $60. And there it stayed. I was the only bidder. All that means to you is that I’m back, and I’m not going away.

If you don’t know who I am, then I don’t know how you got here, but let me welcome you, and tell you who I am.

1984 – Born.
1987 – Geek. I type what is on index cards to start Commodore 64 games. You remember, right? LOAD”*”,8,1
1990 – Full Blown Geek. I disassemble & reassemble the family’s Commodore 128. I tinker inside the READY Prompt and teach myself little bits of BASIC.
1994 – PC Gaming. RAM, Hard Drive, and Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 Upgrades on the family PC.
1996 – I screw up the family PC while tinkering in DOS, and race overnight to reinstall Windows 95 before my family finds out! I’m putting the finishing touches as my dad gets up for his morning coffee. It worked.
1999 – Though I had used the name on ICQ or in games or chat servers a few times, February 8th I register the name NuAngel somewhere permanently. Hotmail. This also marks the year I purchase a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI – so begins my first “loyal fanboy” experience. I buy the original “Unreal” game BEFORE I bought the Voodoo card as incentive to help myself save money so I could play the game in beautiful “Glide” graphics, as it was meant to be played!
1999-2001 – I begin a Geocities website which I call “NuAngel’s Helping Hand.” The “address” had been registered under the name “e_mail_angel” and was originally a site designed to help people find places to get free email instead of paying for it – yes, in the 1990’s, some people paid for email until services like Hotmail and Juno came around. Somewhere around 1999 (maybe 2000?), NuAngel.net is registered for the first time, and points to the Geocities site (…/area51/nebula/9006 – or using the same username path: …/e_mail_angel), where I expanded the site offer gaming headlines, the Half-Life Fox Hole (news and even some exclusive community mods and 3rd party patches for Valve’s Half-Life), and technical support to those who seek it.
2000 – Sometime in the fall, I purchase a 3dfx Voodoo 5500 AGP graphics card, even though I don’t have a motherboard with an AGP slot, yet. But then… December 15th, (what I called “Black Friday”): the day 3dfx suddenly announces they are going out of business.
2001 – I finally build a computer that had an AGP slot and could finally install my already defunct 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. Not satisfied with the thought of not being able to use my new video card, I embark on the journey of urging community development, developing my own driver hacks.
2002 – Ah, young love. My desire to impress my girlfriend forces me to sell all video game consoles so that I can afford prom. I stupidly cave to these instincts. SNES, N64, Game Boy and Virtual Boy go on eBay, including games that will later become rare and valuable (Final Fight Guy & Final Fight 3, a perfect condition boxed copy of Jack Bros. for the Virtual Boy, stuff like that…). Over the summer of 2002, I work a data-entry internship, converting paper catalogs to digital by re-typing product descriptions of thousands of items from paper catalogs into basic Excel spreadsheets.
2003 – I am “credited” as the person who publicly released the 3dfx driver source code in an attempt to spur future development (although there were a lot of people involved in getting that information to the public).
2004 – The Dark Ages begin. College years where I spend time gaming on random consoles, learning how to do console mods, playing PC games on underpowered computers, hacking cell phones, and still partaking in general geekery, but taking much less time for the website.
2005 – In the spring I stumbled my way in to Delta Chi Fraternity. I know what you’re thinking: geeks and fraternities go together like oil and water, but the guys on my campus are welcoming and not the meathead stereotypes that even I have always associated with “frats.” Sept 5th – The day I let NuAngel.net expire, because I had not had much of a reason to publish anything new to the website, and every $20 in my pocket went a long way for me.
2006 – I pick up a summer job doing web design with no formal training, only what I had taught myself from working on the original NuAngel.net. I help a small company with an online store streamline their digital catalog of over 6,000 products – reducing the number of clicks to go from front page to shopping cart. While doing that job, I miss the good old days, but the domain had been expired for over a year and squatters had it now. I launch WinBreak.com.
2007 – Shortly before college graduation, a high school friend and former college roommate gives me hands on time with an Xbox 360. I buy one and fall head over heels into the community. I graduate from Penn State University – Erie campus, the Behrend College, with a degree in English, concentrating in poetry. I think I’m going to become an English teacher or journalist, but only work part time at Circuit City while searching high and low for better work.
2008 – I decide to fall back on my technology skills and find an employer willing to take a chance on me as an entry level Help Desk staffer. During this year, I become a Microsoft Xbox Ambassador (a brief program lead by Microsoft to recognize community members who leave a good impression and go above and beyond trying to help others). I browse forums all over the web, offering advice and trying to help people troubleshoot problems with their Xbox 360’s, as well as offer my time to play games familiarize new users with their console and Xbox Live.
2009 – I become a Microsoft “Most Valued Professional” in the field of Xbox (I clearly recall a time, circa 1997, coveting the title of Microsoft MVPs) after offering much assistance to the community at large. Unfortunately, Microsoft suspended me from the program because of a slip on my part, releasing a few images of the Zune HD (that were not provided to me by Microsoft) which I thought were already available for public consumption. I took my lumps, accepted my punishment, and have since been re-nominated for MVP Status at least once. During that time, I leave the entry level help desk job and a friend helps me land a job that requires a ton of travel but really helps me focus on expanding my IT knowledge.
2010 – I reacquire this domain name, and the few bits of “tech news” that I had covered on WinBreak.com now come here.
2011 – I start a new job, move to a new state, don’t have the time to be as active as I would like with the website, but make efforts to keep the life support pumping. I attempt a few failed side projects: EpicPoet/EpicPoets.com & GamersTable.com. The first being a website devoted to geek poetry, where anyone could submit their writings and have feedback and ratings given. Nerd Core and ChipTune music exists, right? So why not Nintendoetry (a portmanteau of Nintendo and Poetry)? I never did anything to promote it and it whithered on the vine. GamersTable.com began back in 2009, but was buried in 2011. Chat rooms are more of a thing of the past, I decided to try out 4 chats on one page (General Gaming, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo chat rooms). Any of chat windows could be maximized to have your main attention, while the other three stayed active on the side of the page. Very little use, never took off. Abandoned both to stick to simple blogging!
2012 – Nearly daily posts since jumpstarting the site again, and a 13th birthday celebration for the name NuAngel. Month after month, the visit count continues to grow and the site settles, for now, to a steady and predictable schedule. I find that writing articles based on the problems I’m solving at work are becoming great fodder for the website.
2013 – Regular posts continue, though dropping off in frequency. I’ve done a lot to rebuild some of my video game collection from when I was a kid. Doing lots of writing on side projects, and even discussing the possibility of podcasting or a video series with a few different friends. July I start a new job back closer to home, August 14th my mother passed away, then on the 31st I had my own birthday. I would write a few sparse articles, mostly topical editorial type things. Although I intend to keep writing, the podcasts and other ideas have get placed on hold, and my writing is a bit more periodic. No telling what the future holds for sure, but considering I’ve been putting content on the web in some form or another for over 15 years, I don’t see it stopping any time soon.
2014 – Early in the first quarter and writing is taking a more editorial turn. Less frequent news coverage and more detailed and opinionated writing. Some will say I haven’t earned enough recognition to write editorials, but I’ve been writing for small audiences for literally over half my life. The podcasting / video show is still a possibility, but won’t launch this year. I have made strides in working on it, 2014 is clearly a year of sparse updates and personal challenges – but it just gives me more fuel for later! Stay tuned!
2015 – I buy a house! I’m like an adult now… or something. I’m settling in and have looked in to recording for the video show I want to launch – some things are coming together, and some things have hit stumbling blocks – but life in general is coming together, it’s quite exciting! One or two posts a month just to address things that I’m thinking about, but eventually we’ll get back up to speed and make even more regular posts. It’s going to be an exciting few months!
2016 – The video project has launched over at OurStorySoFar.tv! I begin working on it in late November 2015, and kicked it off on Christmas day of 2015, because I was too eager to wait an extra week. Since the videos are gaming related, I still embed them on this site. Oh, and, I haven’t defaulted on my mortgage or burned down the house like an idiot! Aren’t you all proud of me? Look at me go! October 28th of this year I launched a new website, The Windows Update, where I aggregate as many Microsoft company blogs as I can in to one source that doesn’t constantly disappear leaving behind nothing but dead links.
2017 – The Windows Update news site is off and running itself, it’s mostly an aggregator of various Microsoft official press statements, with occasional editorial content, which is mostly duplicated here. I launched a new video series I call Quick Tech Support on the NuAngelDOTnet YouTube Channel. Occasional editorial blog posts continue on this site, and in February, my use of the name NuAngel has reached 18 years. OurStorySoFar.TV continues to go strong, and I’ll keep making new episodes as long as I’m still having fun.
2018 – While continuing OurStorySoFarTV, I experimented with some motovlog + gaming video content.
2019 – The beginning of the year I take some time off from making new episodes of OurStorySoFarTV in order to migrate the videos from their own website over here to NuAngel.net, and to merge the videos to the NuAngelDOTnet YouTube channel. I make some videos for YouTube about my motorcycling hobby. Just as I started making videos again, I was in a motorcycle accident. A broken thumb made mouse manipulation quite a pain and made editing videos impractical. This threw off the last third of the whole year. I plan to let the OSSFTV domain expire just to consolidate most of the stuff I produce under the NuAngel.net banner.
2020 – Mostly recovered from my accident, as the world dealt with the fallout of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, I was working harder than ever at my regular day job. I continued to make occasional posts and videos, but as of this moment, the website has been relegated back to “hobby” status. TheWindowsUpdate.com continues to grow with some recent SEO techniques. I removed the old commentary posts, and never got around to producing the podcast style videos I had planned on. So at this time it’s still just a website that aggregates Microsoft blogs in case they (and the useful information they contain) disappear! A lifelong struggle with weight loss is chronicled in a series of videos.
2021 – I let a lot of the non-profit work I was doing consume my life, and even founded my own non-profit organization… but honestly this year is more exhausting than enriching. In December of 2020 and throughout most of 2021, I spend a lot of the year working on a charity project of my own, where take computers as donations, refurbish them, and give them out to others who might not otherwise be able to afford their own. Also, I took my first new job in eight years and have suddenly been given the task of learning how to by a Linux server administrator! It’s daunting and intimidating, but I dive into it on August 30th, the day before my 37th birthday. The weight loss videos continue, and while I’m far from healthy, by November of 2021, I reached my healthiest weight in over a decade.
2022 – January 10 my father died unexpectedly. I spend much of the year coasting through, doing non-profit work as needed, and just working my full-time job. This website suffered, but I do continue to make posts here and there, falling back on the old trick of using my own website as a great archive of solutions to computer problems I tread to search the internet for and couldn’t find. If I had to solve the problem on my own, I assume I’m not the first person who tried to search for help, so I figured I would be the page they find! One bit of good news, the computer charity has become NuAngel.org and is an actual 501(c)(3) recognized by the IRS! I’m still by no means a master of Linux, but I do consider myself a full stack sysadmin, as I continue to expand my horizons on everything from Firewalls and InfoSec, to Virtualization, Windows and Linux server administration, and so much more. My increasing usage of Linux is reflected in the articles being posted to the website. Oh, and every pound I lost between 2020 and 2021 I put back on in 2022.

The rest has yet to be written… I maintain this page as more of a chronicle of my own story than an about section, anymore.

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