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computerwriter.com
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Bio: Who
the heck is this
guy?
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 Myles
White is a regular contributor to Smart Computing Magazine,
a columnist in Your Office Magazine
and regularly participates as
a host and seminar presenter at the Computer Fest shows in Toronto.
He
has also recently been a contributor to CRN Canada
(Canadian Computer Reseller News), CanadaComputes.com,
and Profit Magazine.
He was a weekly columnist in the Fast Forward
Section of the Toronto Star, until the section was
discontinued in 2001. He was associate editor of We Compute from April 1997 to December,
1999 and of Toronto Computes! for 10 years, prior to April, 1997.
Over the past several years, he's also been a
contributor to The Computer Mechanics, CTV's NewsWorld, CFRA radio in Ottawa, CKNW radio in
Vancouver, Discovery Canada's EXN.TV, Small
Business Canada Magazine, Computer Currents, Computing Canada,
and Home Computing and Entertainment Magazines.
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He is the author of How
to Buy a Computer and How to Avoid Buying a New Computer,
both published by McClelland and Stewart (but both now sadly out of
print).
All of these activities beat Hell out of having a real
job.
In past lives, he has been a radio disc jockey (CJOR,
Vancouver), a television producer, director, and executive producer (CBC
Television Current Affairs: Take 30, the fifth estate, Man Alive, CBC
Access), a teacher (Seneca College department of Continuing Education), a
drug and alcohol rehabilitation counsellor (Renascent Fellowship) and word
processing company owner and computer consultant (Typetronics).
He no longer operates a film company (Mage Productions), but that's just
this month.
He's really a nice chap, unless of course, you sell
computer-related products; then he's known as "The Reviewer from
Hell."
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  His
family includes:
- Son, Andrew
- Lady wife, Ann,
- Two dogs (Lucy, the c'nardly, and Barkley, the beagle),
- Two cats (Scamp, a white and grey bundle of nervous energy who fully lives up to his
name and slaughters mousies in batch lots, and Princess, an all-white part-Siamese who
also lives up to her name).
- Inumerable pond fish and tropical fish
Just in case this stuff is also of interest to you, his hobbies
include woodworking, gardening (he grows killer roses and raises pond fish),
raising tropical fish, reading science fiction, collecting wizards, dragons, gargoyles and
chimera, and (or so it seems) doing laundry and baking bread.
His computers include:
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Quasimodo: A 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB
of Direct Rambus DRAM, an nVidea GeForce2 graphics controller and
about 100 GB of storage space. It runs Windows 2000 Professional and
Windows XP Pro in a dual-boot environment.
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Pendragon: an ageing Dell Dimension XPS
Pentium 200 MMX that has had so many upgrades its mother wouldn't
recognize it. It runs Windows 98;
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Testbed (aka Frank2): self-built as an exercise for the
Toronto Star PC Upgrade series in 1999 and continues to be my hardware
test-bed. Frank2 currently sports a 500 MHz Pentium III and 128 MB of
RAM and is so named because it is tall, has bolts in
its neck, exhibits an attitude, and was built in the lab late one night. It
runs Windows 98 SE;
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Gertie: an IBM Aptiva with 800 MHz Athlon
processor running Win98SE, used exclusively by the aforementioned lady
wife, and;
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Rosie: also a Pentium 200 MMX that once
belonged
to Ann, but now exists only as a Windows Me box for software testing
purposes.
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Frank: The original Frank has, sadly,
died. It started out in life as a 286 and was finally upgraded to the
point where it couldn't be any more, ending its life as a 486DX4. It's
buried under a table in one of the offices at White's Skunk Works and
Mysteries Emporium. Some day, it may be resurrected as a Linux box.
His philosophy about computers is quite simple:
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Computing is supposed
to make your life better – either by providing you with entertainment, by increasing
your efficiency and letting you spend more time doing other things, or preferably doing
both.
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Any product which aids in these pursuits, be it hardware or software, gets to have
nice things written about it.
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Any which does not, either because of faulty design or the
manufacturers' failure to understand the user's needs, either gets shat upon or not
mentioned at all.
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If you're a public relations rep., please
get a good, solid grip on your chair, then see, read, and widely
distribute my Notes
for PR People
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