Who?

So, who am I? And what in God's name is rktcool?

Well, it depends a lot on who you ask.

I like to think of rktcool as an online persona who lives in the internet and likes to hack and code.

Back when I was 16 (which was about a couple of years ago), my strongest feeling about the Internet was fear. Yes, fear. I didn't have access to an internet connection at home until I was almost 16. And when I did, the people around me made sure that I was up to date about what could possibly happen on the Internet, if I weren't careful.

Every other day, I was reminded about about some innocent guy who had lost his money on one of the numerous scams on the Internet. And that was when rktcool was born. I wanted to have a pretty good presence online, but I didn't want to disclose my identity to the whole wide world.

The name though, was derived from a movie I saw at that time. It featured a young lady who used the name "rocket girl" in an online chat room. I don't exactly remember the name or the story of the movie, but it was a pretty good watch at that time.

And so, I wanted to be rocketboy originally, but I couldn't get that username on Gmail. I tried rocketcool, but I think that was unavailable too. So, I went with rktcool, and I've not thought about changing my identity since. Well, I did a few times. But the simplicity of this name held me like a charm.

If you are a frequent user of Omegle or Kik, you would have probably heard of me. We might even have chatted a couple of times. There was a time when Omegle was a craze to me, and when I came to know about Kik, it fascinated me. I believe Omegle and Kik have one thing in common - simplicity. At least they did, back then. I am not so sure that they do now.

And talking of Kik, that is where I learned that a good password is worth its weight in gold. My Kik was hacked - twice. And as a very infrequent user, I didn't notice until late that I had lost a few good friends and a lot of good reputation. The guy who cracked me struck up not-so-cultured conversations with a lot of people. Curse my luck!

Back then, I didn't know a thing about coding, building software or building websites. I spent most of my time (when I was 14 to 16) browsing the web, staying on useless (as I later came to realise) chat rooms, and making friends online (which I must say, is not that bad).

But it has been a long way since then - I became interested in computers (in general) and programming (in particular), learned some HTML, kept the fire alive, learned some C/C++, came to be recognized as a good programmer at school (which I'll admit, is next to nothing - no one was interested in computers there, and you were the best if you could print "Hello World!" a 100 times using a for loop), got familiar with basic SQL statements, dived into the wonderful world of PHP, stumbled upon Android and got tangled up in electronics and robotics.

Whew! Yeah, I know. That is quiet a list if you have not met a lot of pros online. But I have seen some people around the Web who can make that list look the size of a mustard. So, I am forever learning, and I am hoping that I'll be good enough some day to deserve a mention from you :-)

Around the start of 2013, I also became interested in hacking. Hacking as in "hacked up a good tool for tidying my database" and NOT as in "hacked my friend's facebook account". Yes, the word hacking is interpreted differently from its original meaning these days (thanks to some really stupid crackers) which is plainly disgusting. I will save that for another post, and another day.

So, this is me! This is rktcool.