About Drew
Hi, my name is Drew McKinney. Over the years I’ve become a writer and a tech-geek. My earliest memories of writing come from second grade. Every Friday, each student of Ms. Stanton’s class had to do something artistic and that something could be one of four things. You could draw a picture, sing a song, do some paper mache, or write a poem. I was the only kid in the class that chose to write a poem and I did it week after week for the entire school year. I think I was a terrible poet but Ms. Stanton was very encouraging and at least pretended to like what she read. I don’t write poetry anymore but lately I’ve been working on some short stories. I may write a novel at some point if I can ever pull myself together…I’ve discovered that writing novels takes a lot longer than reading them. I’ll post my stories on this site when I feel they are ready for public viewings.
My earliest memories of technical dabblings are from when I was in the fifth grade. I had found a “portable” television in the neighbors trash so I dug it out in the middle of the night before it got picked up the next morning by the garbage truck. I figured that it probably wouldn’t work but I was curious to see what was on the inside of it so I took it apart after I had plugged it in and discovered that indeed, it did not work. I noticed that the connector on the motherboard for the power supply (I actually didn’t know the names of those parts when I was in fifth grade) was broken off but I couldn’t see anything else wrong with it so I did what any other kid would do. I borrowed a soldering iron from the neighbor and I re-soldered that connector back onto the board (I had read about soldering but this was my first time actually doing it). The television worked! I was the only kid in the neighborhood that I knew of that had a portable television. I became a bit popular with my friends, see, all of us would get kicked out of our homes “to get some fresh air” but the real reason was because our parents thought that the television would ruin our lives. I had to keep that television secret for many years and I’m surprised that my parents never found it in the garage where I kept it hidden, a testament to our garage-cleaning abilities I guess. From there I became a ham radio operator, got a TRS-80, took some classes in BASIC (one of the guys from the ham radio club taught a class at Moorpark College and he didn’t mind if twelve year olds took his class), built some Heath-Kits, and discovered Star Trek somewhere along the way as well.
I was born in San Francisco, California on June 23, 1974 and moved to Simi Valley, California in 1976. I’ve lived in Georgia, Utah, South Carolina, and Virginia but moved back to southern California when I was sixteen and moved back to San Francisco in 1998. Over the years I’ve had many jobs: landscaper, burger-flipper, volunteer fireman, grocery store bag-boy (and various other grocery store jobs like clerk, produce clerk, receiver, night crew), receptionist for a lame company that couldn’t even afford to pay my $8/hour salary, account manager for a company that made medical devices, book store manager, dispatcher for a plumbing company, waiter, bartender, cook, dishwasher, telemarketer (I’m sorry, I really needed the money at the time), facilities manager, systems administrator, Amway distributor, paperboy, door-to-door donut salesman (they were spudnuts…donuts made from potatoes, not a very good door-to-door item), and last but not least, computer consulting and freelance writing which is what I do now.
