Announcements

Announcements

Why “The Alpha Geek”?

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I have said “Once a Geek always a Geek” so many time in describing myself. Since I was a small child the main goal in my life has been to learn new things daily. While I write this, on the whiteboard in front of my me in my office, is written in large letters “What new things have you learned today?”. It is a reminder to myself that the day will not be complete until something new is learned. Luckily for me in my line of business you would have to work very hard not to learn something new on a daily basis.

With that attitude in mind since childhood it was very difficult not to grow up and become a full-fledged Geek at an early age. In my early teens I was into photography and processing and printing my own B&W photos in a darkroom I had built with the help of my Mom in our basement in Canada. That was one of my many interests at the time and I can’t even remember how many different “Geeky” things I have done over the years. I got into electronics when I could not afford to buy a proper darkroom timer and I saw some article, probably in some electronics magazine, that explained how to build a simple timer that blinks a LED at one second intervals. After a trip, probably to Radio Shack, to buy a 555 timer IC, a LED, some resistors, wires and a small perforated circuit board. After that I was hooked on electronics projects from that day.

Some years later, while I was an undergrad at university, I was learning mainframe programming in Fortran and assembler programming for some mini-computer I do not remember. Since they were giving us only a few minutes of mainframe processor time a semester a bunch of friends and I bought one of the original Apple 1 kits and I built it for the group and we used that for a few years to supplement our mainframe time. Then followed a Timex Sinclair, a Commodore 64, a Portable Commodore 64, a 128, a PC XT clone with a huge 10Mb hard drive and then hundreds of PCs, laptops, Palm PDAs, tablets and electronic computing devices and gadgets of all kinds.

When I started consulting in 1983 a major part of my time was spent integrating and repairing computer hardware and I even worked for a few years repairing systems nobody else could fix. Nowadays besides programming some business applications on a variety of platforms I still spend a lot of time integrating specialized hardware with software and designing electronic devices of all kind. Since I started with that first simple electronics project over 45 years ago, the Geek in me is still going strong and even though the “Geek” badge is generally used describing the younger crowds I think that a grizzled grey-haired Geek veteran like me deserves the title of “Alpha Geek”. Experience should count for something…

If you noticed I capitalize “Geek” as I think it is a term of respect and not one of derision. I hope that all the Geeks out there will love visiting this blog that will grow to host many projects and features. I also hope that it will help in convert Geeks-in-Training to full-fledged card-carrying Geeks like that first project did for me so long ago.

In the meantime enjoy your stay and let’s Geek Out!

Technology Experience

  • Research & Development (R & D)
  • Desktop Applications (Windows, OSX, Linux, Multi-OS, Multi-Tier, etc…)
  • Mobile Applications (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, etc…)
  • Web Applications (LAMP, Scripting, Java, ASP, ASP.NET, RoR, Wakanda, etc…)
  • Social Media Programming & Integration (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc…)
  • Content Management Systems (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Moodle, etc…)
  • Bulletin Boards (phpBB, SMF, Vanilla, jobberBase, etc…)
  • eCommerce (WooCommerce, OSCommerce, ZenCart, PayPal Shopping Cart, etc…)

Instructor

  • DOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android, Multi-OS
  • Linux-Apache-PHP-MySQL
  • Robotics
  • Arduino
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Espressif

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The Alpha Geek

Why “The Alpha Geek”?

Don Luc Aphasia

Luc Aphasia

J. Luc Paquin – Curriculum Vitae
https://www.donluc.com/DLHackster/LucPaquinCVEngMk2020a.pdf

Web: https://www.donluc.com/
Web: http://www.jlpconsultants.com/
Web: https://www.donluc.com/DLHackster/
Web: https://www.hackster.io/neosteam-labs
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neosteam.labs.9/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5eRjrGn1CqkkGfZy0jxEdA
Twitter: https://twitter.com/labs_steam
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/NeoSteamLabs/

Don Luc

Don Luc – Aphasia

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After extensive traveling and working all over the world, in the spring of 2003 Luc moved from Canada to Mexico with his Mexican wife and business partner Normita and they are lived near Mexico City during 9 years where run their worldwide business interests.

On December of 2012, Luc decided to move to California where he had some business to attend, unfortunately, on September 25th of 2013, Luc suffered a massive stroke that let him with an aphasia & apraxia condition; although Luc has this problem he has been working with various electronic projects since then.

Don Luc

Stressful Years – 2015-2018

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We had one of those very stressful years running around the house trying to accomplish a lot of tasks and working on a lot of new things. This did not give me even a few free minutes to post the blog.

There has been a flurry of activity around here in the past week as we are preparing for a launch later this week or next a bunch of new features for the blog and the site. I think that you will like what we have planned and I am working out the details as we speak, and wildly programming all the features so they work perfectly from day one. Please watch for a formal announcement later this week or first thing next week. Today there will be a lot of short post to catch up with a dry years.

Don Luc

Tomorrow’s Video – An Introduction to Microcontrollers

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Mar 28, 2012 @ 22:12

I’m hard at work… Actually make that “I think” that tomorrow’s video post will be an introduction to microcontrollers. I will dig some stuff out of the drawers tomorrow and as usual make it up as I go and it will probably be about microcontrollers.

Sleep tight…

Don Luc

New Format and Name

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Mar 14, 2012 @ 23:39

This blog was launched close to 2 years ago and was active only a few weeks. Our work load got the best of us and most of the blogs we maintained have been inactive since then. In the past weeks we have started to revamp our web presence and for this blog the first step was to change its focus and name. It was started as a consulting industry blog called “Consult Ants” and it will now become “The Alpha Geek” a video blog about all things technological. In the coming days the first video post will be live and we will also start posting project from programming of all kind (desktop, microcontroller, web and mobile) to electronics and even music instrument hacks.

Watch this space in the coming days for our debut video and further announcements.

Don Luc

Looking for House in Mexico City

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Apr 26, 2010 @ 21:03

We are actively looking for renting or buying a house in a good colonia of Mexico City. We have been renting classrooms and space for our various courses and conferences for a while and renting space for this in a good area of town gets very expensive very quickly. It prevents us from giving as many course as we wish, or making the courses as long as we wish. We also cannot cater to smaller classes like I prefer to do as we have to have a certain amount of people registered to justify the rental of a room for the course. Add to that that traveling time from where we currently live to most centric areas of town have increased from around an hour to from 2 to 3 hours each way 7 days a week, so even going to give the classes is getting more and more difficult and I do not see any real change except for getting worse.

We want to remedy the situation by either renting or buying a house in a good area of town and use part of the house to give our courses and conferences. This would solve the problem of being able to offer as many course as we want, being able to offer course for smaller groups, and definitively eliminate the traveling problem.

If anybody reading this post has something to offer us, or know of someone who might have something, please contact me directly as I am open to any suggestions.

Don Luc

Welcome to our new consulting industry blog!

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Apr 20, 2010 @ 12:35

I have been blogging for over 5 years now in other venues and I thought that it was time to post my thought about what has been my main business for over 25 years. I started as a food-wine consultant back in the early 80’s. I was also active in the emerging field of computer graphics and animation at the time and also started to be more and more involved in the IT world as I had trained as a programmer at university. By the dawn of the 90’s I was a full time IT consultant/programmer/graphics/animation specialist. Then the industry changed rapidly with the event of the big Internet crash of the late 90’s and I became a software developer and launch my own line of products. Now I am back where I started and I am a Business/IT/Programmer/Hardware/Robotics/Graphics/Animation/Web/Food/Wine specialist.

I have seen many trends come and go, good and bad, and lived through many major industry changes. I do deplore some of the current state of the industry, and applaud some of the new trends. My wife had been telling me for years to write about the the industry as we discuss things a lot and she always tells me that I was born to teach, or preach when I get excited about a subject. Since my motto has always been to learn something new daily, and that a wasted day is one where you learn nothing new, I decided to share some of that hard-earned let’s call it “wisdom” for lack of a better term.

I know that I am considered as a dinosaur in this business where you are considered old when you hit 25, but there are some of us old fogies at over twice that, that are still active and can still provide a full contribution to this or these fields.

Don Luc