About Me

Me and my dogs, Brian the Basenji and Lucas the Miniature Pinscher.

I'm not ususally very good at this kind of thing, its hard for me to put into words who I am. I think to really know about a person you must meet them face to face. Irregardless I am going to try and give a little explanation of myself.

First of all, I was born and raised in the Las Vegas area in August of 1985. I had a nice, normal childhood. My parents were awesome, pretty much the best I could ever ask for, except maybe if they won the lottery or something. Just kidding, my parents Joe and Lynn are great and I love them more than life itself. I grew up in a small suburb of Las Vegas name Boulder City, the home of the Hoover Dam. The city is a small community with about 15,000 people, most of whom are elderly. There is a no growth policy in the town so the city never grows by more than a dozen or so homes a year. This keeps it nice and small, but the bad part is that there was nothing to do as a kid except cause trouble. Despite the city being so small, the Boulder City Police Department was fairly large. And since there isn't much crime in that town, they usually have nothing better to do than harrass kids or pull people over for no turn signal, no front license plate, or tint that is too dark (all of which I've gotten tickets for). Luckily I was able to fly under the radar in High School and never got in trouble with the cops - something none of my friends were able to do. I was a smart kid in school, I excelled until mid the beginning of High School. I started to slack off and ditch class, never doing much work - just the minimum to get by. I got mostly D's with a few F's, but one class I actually did good in. No, not Gym class, the one that most everyone Aces. I got A's and B's in all my math classes. For some reason I found them fun and liked to do the work rather than sit and stare at the clock. Actually I was so good in math class that I made it into honors algebra. Since I was a Junior with the credits of a Freshman, I figured there was not enough summer school and after school classes that I could take to graduate in time. Although now I wish I would have waited until I was a Senior so that I could hang out with my friends and party on the weekends without any real responsibilities, but I dropped out halfway through my Junior year.

I didn't even take a month off before I signed up for classes at the local community college to get a taste of the college life. I took a semester or two there and when the new school year started, I enrolled into ITT Technical Institute, a private college geared towards technology degrees such as IT, Software Development, Electrical Engineering, Computer Graphics, etc. First I got my Associate's Degree in Computer Networking, then went on to get my Bachelor's Degree in Information System Security. So basically I was trained to be a white hat hacker, or as they like to call it in the corporate world, a computer security expert.

Me at my Graduation, with my mom, my brother, my girlfriend at the time, and my dad.

One of the main reasons I applied at ITT was because they said that they would help place me in a job after I graduate. I went on a total of ZERO interviews from them, so I gave up on that option. I finally got a job with a company doing video editing - making small commercials that were being used mainly for trade show advertisements and things like that. I had done a little bit of video editing before, but nothing big so it took a little while to get a hold of it. And since the company was a small organization of the owner and his partner, and then one of the owner's daughter, wife, and son-in-law. So they didn't pay me by the hour they paid per project completed. Since I was new at this it took me much longer than those who were doing it for years, I ended up working 12 hour days and on weekends for only 40 hours of pay. Eventually I was moved to a different position doing web development. This was harder but I liked it more because I had always wanted to know more about software and website development. This was another situation where I was new to the field so it took much longer for me to do things than my boss, so he would only pay certain amount of hours for certain jobs. He would get angry if I went a little over in hours, but the worst part is that I actually spent much more time than he even thought! So after working for the company for like 4 years and doing the web stuff for over 2, they started to introduce a new 'feature' that would make what I did completely obsolete. At the time the started talking about it, I asked many times if I would still have a job. Of course they always answered yes (I bet you can see where this is going) but a few months down the line he told me to come into the office, close the door, and sit down. Nobody else was even in the office because obviously they didn't even care to say bye to me or anything of the sort. Then he just came out and said that I was no longer needed. I was devastated, I helped build their web presence up and then they let me go as soon as they didn't need me anymore. I was replaced with a computer program. I thought it would hurt to lose a job to someone in another country, but to lose it to something who isn't even a person? That's a real ego killer - I felt like crap for weeks after that.

After that fiasco, I started to work on the company that I founded, Connell Technologies, LLC. I kept that going for a few years but I never really broke even after business expenses and very little personal expenses just to live. I tried to spend as little as possible during this time, I even lost my car, my apartment, and everything in storage so I could keep my business going in hopes that it would eventually become profitable. I enrolled in the Apple Developer's Program so I could develop apps for the iOS platform (iPhones, iPad, and iPod touch) which costs $100 a year. So after a while the well dried up, I couldn't get enough clients to help cover my overhead (computer hardware, web hosting, employees and subcontractors, outsourcers, etc). So eventually that wen bankrupt and now I am broke as a joke but half as funny. Now I am trying to start another business up to support myself for the time being and eventually build that up to a nice sized company that is completely automated once set up. I've been writing software for over 15 years and into SEO, SEM and other web technologies for over 7 years - and I'm only 27 years old - so I think I have a pretty good start so far. My new business has a different business model and I am trying to invest little to no money in it, just sweat equity. It may take a little longer but I am determined to make it work this time. Since it hasn't been paying the bills and I've run out of my savings I plan on getting a job for the mean time, but web and software development is my passion so I will always be working on towards that goal.

As for now I am just trying to work on my web presence and built it up. That's about it for my brief little history. If you have any other questions please let me know. Thanks - Jared Connell.