Sharron Field – Owner and Creator of Kkomp.com – Beyond

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email: shazzalive at kkomp dot com

Allow me to introduce myself to the online community: My name is Sharron Field. I’m a geekette, a technowitch, and a computer builder. A geekette being a female geek, a technowitch being a Witch who uses technology, and a computer builder being somebody who builds computers

I’m currently in my 40s and I currently live in Wiltshire in the UK, though I’m hoping to move to hampshire in the not-too-distent future. (South Wiltshire is becoming an asylum for nutters, thugs, and other antisocial types.) I like building computers and I’m damn good at it too; even though I do say so myself: My previous customers I think would agree with me.

My technical experience with analogue electronics goes right back to my childhood, when analogue circuit design and construction was a hobby of mine that I engaged in quite a lot. During my teens I started learning about digital electronics to a somewhat lesser extent.

I learned to program in BASIC at 15, and used a Commodore PET in the 1970s. My experience with computers was somewhat limited during the 1980s and 1990s; I stuck to analogue electronics mainly, and found a few jobs in the television repair industry, before opting to get into the sales industry in the 1990s.

In 1995 a road traffic accident basically ended my career in sales; and although I did try to get back into it, with some success, I found that the market had changed quite a bit too much for my liking. For the next few years I attempted to form a partnership with someone else as a trader; but once again the bottom appeared to drop out of that market sector and things again changed too much for my liking.

I decided that I needed to put sales behind me and get into computers in a big way in 1999, and bought my first PC that year. By the end of 2000 I had become fully proficient at operating it, (piece of cake really; not too hard to accomplish) and had learned much about different types of software.

In 2002 I attempted, with some success, to set out as a software consultant/ “IT guru” in the software field; helping people and businesses to maintain their machines on a software-based level, including cleaning viruses and malware from infected machines, setting up networks, installing and recommending operating systems and other software, etc.

This appeared to be productive to a limited extent; but the field was getting more and more competitive, and the cheapo con-artists were moving in on the game. I decided in 2004 that maybe it was time to retrain in electronics, get a qualification or two, and start in that field on a professional level.

While studying for my City and Guilds qualification at college I would also work with the students in the adjacent computer lab; at times even attending lectures when it didn’t interfere with my course. I learned quite a bit that way, and although I left college with a City & Guilds 300 and 301 in electronics; I decided that it was time to build my own computer, having recently been ripped off by a company who I’d asked to build one for me to my specifications.

(What happened there was I flashed the BIOS on my existing computer without connecting a supply protection device such as a UPS into the power circuit; during which along came a power-spike and wrecked it. This was just after Christmas, and I decided that rather than change the motherboard on my existing machine, which by then was getting rather old, I’d get a new machine built specially for me. I asked the firm I chose for the job to include a 64-bit dual-core processor, DDR2 RAM , use quality components, and build me something that would last. I needed it the next day, and I wasn’t going to rush my first build and try to do it myself; which was why I contracted the work.

When I received the computer by courier next day it worked; but didn’t appear to work as well as I’d hoped. I noticed that it had a 32-bit operating system installed, but I’d catch up on my work that was piling up before I installed a 64-bit OS. Later I noticed that it wasn’t displaying the 2nd CPU core either. Eventually when I got round to it I reinstalled Windows, but it still only showed a single core.

I opened it up and found that it was running a 32 bit AMD Sempron, using generic DDR RAM, was using the onboard 64MB graphics, was built out of cheap and nasty components, and that the hard-drive wasn’t even mounted properly.)

It was at that point that I made a number of builds, including 2 for myself, a couple which I sold, and soon after that I started a business called Kustom Komputa, which custom-made desktop PCs for people.

I noticed that business was tailing off during the end of 2007, rather than increasing before the holiday season as I’d expected. Although I wasn’t at that point aware of an impending recession, I projected a loss overall during 2008 using 2 models. I cancelled plans for further restocking of supplies and reigned in on advertising. By May 2008 I’d got everything awaiting the future, scaled down a lot, but on tickover, just in case an opening emerged, such as a lucrative contract to supply x number of boxes… which never happened.

It was at this point that I became interested in looking more into blogging, and I launched this blog; kkomp.com. Why kkomp.com? I originally intended it to be part of Kustom Komputa; a kind of interactive advertising domain as it were; but things just didn’t happen that way at the end of the day.

I’d been a freebie subscriber to pcmech.com on and off over the years. Somehow I found out that PC Mech were doing a live chat session on a weekly basis, and I started participating. I got talking online to David Risley, who encouraged me to start blogging, which I did. This was the start of my relationship to pcmech.com. I would go on to write a number of articles for them during 2008 in addition to those for my blog. It’s about time that I wrote some more for them too, as I haven’t guest-posted there since. I’ll get round to it at some point. I have had an article posted on davidrisley.com during 2010, as I swung the content-theme of this blog round to also incorporate the technologies of blogging and internet marketing into the blend, in addition to just computers themselves. At that time I’d recently just taken David Risley’s Blog Masters Club course, which had taught me a lot about problogging. Prior to this I’d been on Yaro Starak’s Becomeablogger course; which had taught me the basics of blogging as well as quite a bit more besides; so in essence I felt qualified to embark around then on my career as a problogger. – immediately following that, however, circumstances forced what I can only describe as a minor mid-life crisis on me; so the blog is currently at time of writing only taking off slowly in that direction.

In fact, between the two of them; David Risley and Yaro Starak have taught me jointly around 96% or more of what I know about blogging. In particular David taught me that a combination of blogging and internet marketing will produce a very successful profitable blog, from which it’s possible to generate an income.

With these two successful problogger entrepreneurs as my gurus I feel empowered and also feel that failure is not an option.

I currently own several domains, and, at time of writing, I use one of them to host this blog, one for marketing purposes, and the rest are at rest, as it were.

I started this blog with a little trepidation, and really not much idea what I was doing either, in June 2008. From than on it took over completely from my computer-building business, Kustom Komputa. Although I still build computers for pretty much anyone in the UK who requests me to do so, it’s not my primary line of work any more: I see more gain in blogging on computers at a professional or semi-professional level than in building them in this current economic climate.

I do try to post to this blog at least once a day, but sometimes there are just too many other things to be done or that get in the way, so it doesn’t happen on the odd occasion.

As I already mentioned; I’m a technowitch; and the witchcraft part of me is as real as the techno part of me: Witchcraft-wise I would describe myself as a neo-Wiccan; because although I don’t actually belong to the Wiccan faith I do have a rather similar belief structure – With a few parts of Buddhism, Shamanism, and a tiny smidgen of Neo-Druidry thrown in to the mix. I have psychic/mediumistic abilities which I’m still discovering. I find a combination of the ultimately physical with the parapsychological and the spiritual a most wholesome and uniquely fascinating blend of interests.

There’s more; some of which you can read on the Additional Comment page, as well as even in some of the articles themselves. – But I don’t want to overdo it on this page for now. I’ve already written a lot, and you’ve probably read enough to make your eyes weary. In the future I’ll probably post more in a series of articles or parts thereof under the heading of “My Life Story” or similar; which’ll be a challenge as I really don’t like writing autobiographies anyway.

This has turned out like a cross between a "life story" and an "about me" page. I don’t like writing autobiographies at the best of times, and one of the reasons why is that I’m not that good at writing autobiographies. – But like it or lump it you’re stuck with this, so enjoy it.

I hope you gain enlightenment and knowledge from this blog.

…Paint the whole world with a rainbow!