Well, first off, a blessed Thanksgiving to you all.
After finding that one of my college friends has been writing her own blog, I decided that it's about time that I give this blogging thing a shot.
First, an introduction to those of you who have forgotten me, or don't know me:
My name is Nathaniel A. "Joker" Miller. I'm a 25 year-old, perpetually single geek. If that amount of information doesn't scare you off, congratulations. You're braver than most.
I work as the Junior Systems Administrator in the Information Technology Department at LeTourneau, Inc. (soon to be known as LeTourneau Technologies, Inc.) in Longview, Texas, where I am directly responsible for approximately 60 servers and most of the software on them, as well as having partial responsibility for another 20 servers at various other locations throughout the company.
I live outside of Longview with my part-time roommate and college friend Juan "Nacho" Lopez, a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Louisiana Technical University in Ruston, LA. Nacho owns the house we live in, and I "rent a room" from him. A pretty good deal, given how infrequently he's around. I practically have my own house, without all the extra expenses.
I was born and raised in Sioux Falls, SD, where my father was the engineer for KNWC radio and my mom was a captioner and home-school teacher. I have a younger sister by almost five years, Carolee, who is currently a junior at Judson College in Elgin, IL studying Architecture.
I attended public school until 8th Grade, at which point my mother started home-schooling me and my sister. We attended Central Baptist Church until I was 10, at which point we went with Grace Church, a plant Central started, with which my father served a term as an elder, my mother was head of the Missions Committee, and my whole family was the primary Sound/Media Crew.
My family moved to Elkhart, IN just before I turned 18, where my parents are now serving with HCJB World Radio. My dad is a Design Engineer, and my mom helps in Accounting section. 8 months after we moved to Elkhart, I left home for college at LeTourneau University here in Longview, where I studied Computer Science Engineering, and later added a second major for Engineering, Computer Concentration (yes, they are different things, but there's a lot of overlap). I was placed on a floor known as 41, which is where I met Nacho and many other great brothers with whom I spent 5 years.
After graduation, I was looking for a job in Computer Logic/Hardware Design, but was coming up empty. To pay the bills for the summer (during which I was finishing my Senior Engineering Project), I got a job as a Student Field Technician with LeTourneau, Inc.'s IT department. After the project was done and they kicked me off campus, I hadn't found anything else to do, so I just kept working at LeTourneau and moved in with Nacho, who had 1 room open at the time. I continued that way for over a year, until LeT-Inc was able to offer me a position - as Systems Administrator. I was surprised, but given the job stability and a not-small raise, I accepted.
Since shortly after coming to Longview, I've been attending Fellowship Bible Church, where I've been involved with the College Group and, in the last few months I've joined the Men's Ministry.
That pretty well sums up my life to this point. I'll have some things occurring over the next couple weeks that I'll try to write about here, but as anybody can tell you, my communication skills are not all that great. Hopefully I'll be able to keep writing here, though I don't know if anybody will read it.
Until next time,
NAM
