Who is Kelly Adams?

You can look at my ‘About Me‘ page here. Thanks… bye!

Okay, that is a bit of a cop-out. That page is intended to be ‘light and airy’, and the story of me isn’t always that much fun. So I’ve decided to go a bit deeper here. Not too deep, though: I don’t want to bore / sicken / scare too many people away. So read on if you want to know what has made Kelly Adams- the man, the legend, the uber-geek.

It all started in Edmonton…

I was born in Edmonton, Alberta in January of 1964. My parents already had five children and thought they were ‘done’: I was sort of a surprise, born six years after my closest sibling.

My father had a stroke when I was four years old and was left significantly disabled. In essence I was raised by a single parent and because of age differences with my siblings I was sort of an ‘only’ child. Limited by a single income, Mom kept us housed in subsidized or ‘social’ housing. For various reasons we moved a lot: nine times by the time I graduated High School.

I had a lot health problems as a kid. Allergies, asthma, things like that. I also never fit in while attending Elementary or Junior High. I hated sports of all kinds and preferred reading. That, coupled with all the moving around we did, made me the ‘weird nerdy kid’ that most kids teased or avoided.

Reading

I read a lot, mostly science fact early on, then science fiction and a bit of fantasy. Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, Blish, Leiber, Simak, “Doc” Smith, Sturgeon, Anderson, Clarke, Dick, Silverberg, Tolkien: these were my early friends. I gradually migrated to more and more speculative science fiction and increasing amounts of fantasy. Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, Terry Pratchett, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Anne McCaffery, Robert Aspirin, Ursula K. Le Guin… you get the idea.

Depression and dark thoughts

My experience from grade four to about grade eight was a complete nightmare. I hated school because of the teasing and my social ineptitude, and tried my utmost to avoid attending. I spent a lot of time thinking about ending my own life.

I think the only reason I made it through this time was because in grade nine I attended a school with a ‘perspective for living’ focus, with classes on how people can be different and why treating each other poorly can lead to terrible outcomes. The students there were, for the most part, actually kind: my attendance didn’t improve due to my health problems, but my happiness definitely did.

I also started getting involved with non-learning activities at school. I joined the A/V club, and was the treasurer on our school council. I survived, despite all my defects.

Discovering computers

When I was fourteen I had my first few encounters with actual computers. An early Commodore Pet in a department store fascinated me. And then I got a few minutes on a terminal attached to a Vax 11/780 running BSD Unix at the University thanks to a friend whose father was a faculty member. This led me to a specific school that was one of the first in Alberta with a computer-related electronics course.

Teenage friends, computers, and gaming

In High School I really found my ‘tribe’. Computer Electronics was my bastion, my armour, and my foundation. Some of my fellow students were building S-100 computers, and a few of us bought early commercial machines. I ended up with an Apple ][ +. My Mom co-signed for a loan for it, and I worked summer and part time jobs to pay it off.

I socialized with the other students working with computers, and eventually became part of a group of four or five people that I felt I was really connected with. This was a first for me and, despite my health issues keeping me out of school a lot, I really felt like I belonged.

Gaming

I and a few others in that electronics class completed the entire programming syllabus in the first few weeks of the semester. From that point we pursued our own coding and electronics interests. I wrote a hangman game that used the Apple ][‘s not-so-amazing graphics, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game where I included some 6502 machine language to increase performance. I also recall building a printer from a kit: the printer sucked, and I don’t think I ever really used it.

On weekends and evenings I carried my computer home and played games. At first I mostly typed in game code from books and magazines: tens of hours of painstaking work to get some usually rather pathetic adventure game or the like to start up.

I eventually earned enough through my jobs to start buying games: Microsoft’s version of Crowther and Woods ‘Adventure’ was one of the first ones I bought. Sublogic Flight Simulator (FS1) was an early one as well: it came in a zip lock bag on cassette, which I believe I got exchanged for the disk version when I bought a floppy drive for my Apple. That drive was $750 as I recall: a lot of weekend and after-school work was required for that. Then games like Hellfire Warrior by Epyx (aka Automated Simulations), and the original Wizardry by Sir-tech.

I also played Wizard and the Princess by Sierra Online. I have a small anecdote about those early video game days. I got stuck when I encountered a snake, and died repeatedly. I noticed a California phone number on the back of the sheet packed in the ziplock bag with the game disk, and decided to call it to get help. It was 2:00 AM in the morning, so I wasn’t expecting an answer, but someone did pick up. It was a guy called Ken Williams; I apologized for calling so late, and he said ‘No problem, I’m up coding.’ He gave me a clue (“try the rock”) and that got me past that darned snake. I figured out later just who I had talked to…

Dungeons and Dragons

I eventually gathered a group of like-minded individuals to play a pen and paper role playing game. It was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, a game one of my old friends had been introduced to through his Mensa membership. D&D became a passion that stayed with me for over twenty years: there are several Dungeons and Dragons related articles here on this blog that I wrote.

Adulting

I graduated from High School with three years of honours-level grades and various provincial scholarships. I went straight into University, entering the Honours Computing Science program. I dropped out of University six months later.

I won’t go into the details other than to say that University was a shock to my system and I didn’t deal well with it. After dropping out I struggled to find a path. I applied for many jobs and got none. Eventually I found some computer consulting work, created my own corporation, and took advantage of government salary grants to hire two of my friends during their summer break from University. We coded in my basement using a Tandy 1200 HD I had bought with consulting money and eventually an Altos 586 Unix machine.

My little company lasted about a year. My friends went back to school, no one got rich, and I still wasn’t earning enough to make a living. I finally got a full time job working in computer retail. I basically ran a store for several years, then got hired by one of their competitors for a larger salary, and gradually started doing coding and LAN (Novell Network) consulting.

More depression

After nearly a decade in the computer consulting business I realized that I had no social life. I had my best friends and we played D&D on weekends, and occasionally went to a bar or movies. But I had never learned how to interact with a woman.

I once again fell into some rather dark thoughts that I struggled to pull myself out of. I eventually concluded that I would likely die alone, so I decided to start pursuing some attainable interests.

Horseback riding and the love of my life

One of those interests was horseback riding: fantasy novels and gaming had introduced me to horses of all types, and that had led me to more practical books on equitation, trail riding, and different horse breeds. I ultimately decided to sign up for introductory lessons,

Horseback riding curiously led me to the woman who became my wife: Irene. She was my first and last romance. We’ve shared many ups and downs, during which time we cohabitated with a great many cats (as many as eight at once!) and three dogs. I wrote about some of our then-current furry freeloaders a couple of years ago. I stopped riding 25 years ago, but Irene still has her horse. We are still together 34 years after saying ‘I do’.

Shortly after marrying Irene one of my best friends helped me get a better job. He recommended me for a position as a network technologist for Novell Netware at ISM Alberta, a partially-owned subsidiary of IBM. That job with IBM became my lifetime career during which I progressed through many positions including solution architect and software development team lead.

Hobbies

Over the years I pursued a few different pastimes with varying degrees of success. I still played computer and console games and read books: these things are sort of my ‘geek core’, I guess. I tried to learn the piano and discovered I really have no musical talent, although I also know I didn’t put in adequate effort. In 2010 I started riding motorcycles as a recreation. I enjoy long road trips on my Harley Davison touring motorcycle, so much so that I’ve actually created a separate blog for that topic. I also got into restoration of antique clocks, but I found it hard to carve out the time for that.

Getting diagnosed and going rural

I also was diagnosed with chronic depression aka persistent depressive disorder in my late 30s. At various points in my life I had fallen into deep depression, but had never really sought treatment until this stage of my life. I got medication, and the truly dark times stopped happening. I’ve also had my share of weird medical problems, none of which have been particularly debilitating.

In 2000 Irene and I relocated to the Lower Mainland in B.C. After 20 years in Surrey, in the midst of COVID when remote work became the ‘norm’, we moved again to Castlegar, B.C.. Castlegar is where we live now.

Old, tired, and retired

In 2024, after 30 years at IBM and Irene’s diagnosis with cancer, I decided to retire. We are still figuring out this whole retirement thing: getting finances organized and thinking about what we want to do with our time.

I’ve given thought to what I want from retirement in the past, and I think many of those ideas remain valid. But right at the moment I feel calm, like rushing forward is not really necessary. Irene and I are cognizant of our limited time in this world, but racing to fill that time isn’t really where are heads are at currently.