Hello. My name is Unclemantis and I am into Music, Photography and Blockchain

Hi. I am @unclemantis and I am new to the SteemIt community. I joined before the weekend and I have already wrote several posts. I am into music, photography, bitcoin, altcoins and the blockchain.

First off, let me share with you all about my love of music. I was never really into music up until the early 1990s. It all started when my father brought my family and a friend from work to see Garth Brooks. My brother was always into music in grade school. He was into all the 80s bands, such as Metallica, Pantera and the like. Myself I got into the early 90s bands such as Sevendust, Hed P.E., Nine Inch Nails, you name it.

Throughout the years I got into harder and heavier music. The heavier the better. One day back in 1993 a friend of my brother's got me to listen to his band called Room w/a View. His name is Ian and I am still friends to him to this day. Ian brought me to see a band in a venue called The Living Room in Providence, RI, across the street from the Coca Cola bottling factory. The Living Room was located on 23 Rathbone Street and the owner's was Randy Hien.

Randy was a great guy. This was his second location of The Living Room. The first was located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and was nick named "The Bubble" because of a window that was convex on the outside. One day my friend Ian introduced me to Randy and we both got in for free to see Godsmack on the date that they first got signed to their first major label. The show was incredible! I was introduced to many local acts. I had no idea how friendly and welcoming they where to me. They acted like real human beings, not like the rock star mentality of the bands I had seen on MTV. I went to Ian's practice space and met the guys of Room w/a View. What a bunch of great guys. They had girlfriends and boyfriends over; people from other bands in the facility and what not. I would visit the the other band rooms and just sit and listen to them play. It was great.

The name of this practice space was nicknamed, "The Foster Building" and it was located in downtown Attleboro, Massachusetts. I met bands named SoulShed, Tung and became close friends of them. I met my best friend in the music business to this day through Tung. His name is Pete and goes by the name of Big Pete Rock or Boston Pete Rock. Now Pete, at the time was the manager for Tung. He loved the band so much he put a lot of this own time and money into the band. Got them into hotels in New York and stuff like that. He would also book them so that they could get gigs anywhere.

Throughout the years bands came and went but I still never stopped discovering new acts. To this day I am focused on the Providence, Rhode Island music scene and it's surrounding cities and states. I met a friend of mine that passed away a few years ago by the name of Sam Robbins. He was a photographer and well known to the photography community. Even my aunt Marie heard of him. At the time back before I was into music and still in grade school, I worked part time at the Attleboro YMCA passing out towels and taking in dues. I was heavily into computers at the time and I still am to this day. Well one day Sam and I got into talking and we hit on a topic that we where both into; photography.

My grandfather was the first one to get me into professional photography. He had a darkroom in the cellar of the house where I live in right now. I used to live in South Attleboro and visit my maternal grandparents any chance I could get. One of my aunts had a Apple II C computer and I would hack the crap out of it. I fell in love with the BASIC computer language. I had a Texas Instruments 99/4A home computer hooked up to the television in my room.

Anyways I am still into computers but let's get back on track about photography. My grandfather had a dark room and he would show me how to develop color and black and white pictures. He also taught me how to preserve photos by taking photos of photos. For my birthday one year when I was, I would say around 12 years old, I got a Pentax K1000 film camera with a wide angle lens attachment and a telephoto lens. I was estatic! My own camera! This was a top notch camera, just like my grandfather had. His name was Charlie and I would call him just grandpa.

Anyways I got so into photography that he helped build me a small dark room in the basement of the house that I lived in throughout my grade school years. it was a simple black and white setup with a yellow light so that I could see what I was doing.

Anyhow, my friend Sam took me over his house one day and showed me his computer set up. He had film cameras and was just starting to get into digital cameras. He had a negative scanner and a CD burning drive. I thought this stuff was state of the art at the time. I was like a kid in a candy store. Sam showed me how to to scan the negatives and and how to catalog them using a computer excel spreadsheet and software that he developed. Sam also showed me how he generated web pages using the photographs. This was back in the day before CMS (content management systems) so everything needed to be coded in HTML 1.0 by hand. My friend didn't know it but he wrote one of the first content management systems ever. He was a pionner.

Well one day we went out to a show at a place called KC's Tap on Broadway, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. This was the first show ever at this bar and the owner who's name is Kevin Cummings also known as KC at his new music venue. The venue was in another lot right next door in this small strip of land on the corner. It used to be a NAPA auto parts place and KC, who is a carpenter by day trade built and connected the two clubs. The club where NAPA used to be was called Cat's. The offical name was Cat's at KC's Tap. it had a room upstairs where the bands could hang out. It had a pool table, a lounge sofa and a big window where people could look down on the others and enjoy the show without being disturbed.

Well anyway, my friend Sam started taking photos of the bands on stage. He was not used to the lime light way of things so when the lights would change colors or go off and on, he would get discuraged and upset. But in time he got used to it and figured his way around.

Cat's had different sound guys, one was named Robert and the other was Jeff Bright. Now Jeff Bright and I go back to this time and we are still friends to this date. He moved away for a while but ended up back in Providence, Rhode Island. That reminds me, I need to touch base with him today. Thank you self! LOL.

One day I discovered that someone installed a computer in Cat's called a streaming media box. It had the logo of a small one man company called Rattlehead Records. Now this was not a record company at all. This was more about spreading the good word of the scene and preserving it. The name of this man was called Ferret. I got into website programming through him. I took the PHP route and he took the PERL route. Both where open source and both of us used Windows as a front end to the Linux back end.

Ferret was into computers, the future and all that jazz. One day he mentioned something about Bitcoin. He tried to explain to me what it was. Over the weekend I did research on Bitcoin and ended up teaching HIM! This was back when a bitcoin was worth $10 dollars each and a block would reward 50 coins. Well I bought about 100 dollars worth of coin and store the private key in a safe place and forgot all about it.

While cleaning up my basement I found the key and said "what the hell. I could use 100 bucks right now". Well guess what, things had changed big time in the blockchain community. The same software I used was no where to be found and there where all these new wallets. Well I imported the private key into a desktop wallet called exodus and I may have secreted a little when I saw the value on the screen. It wasn't $100, or even $1000. I was like "OMG I AM RICH!" But then I came to my senses and calmed myself down. I did research and boy am I happy I am sitting on 10 coin because the halving event is just around the corner. I sold one coin and exchanged it for other coins such as Ethereum, Litecoin, etc.

I always wanted to get into the stock market so I took a gamble. My stocks are not doing well due to the virus but I bought into some newsletters and one of them told me about the blockchain and the other currencies. So I bought Ripple, Tron, Litecoin, Etherium, etc. I told myself, "Hey self! You need to lock this stuff down and hide it away again!". So I took the remaining 9 bitcoin and stored it on a usb key made especially for cryptocurrencies. I learned about backing it up and now I am safe as a bugger.

I am watching every day how my altcoins are going up and down in value but mostly over the long period they are going UP steadly. I came across this new currency called STEEM. I bought quiet a bit of it and transfered it to my SteemIt account. The newsletter I was reading said I needed to PowerUP so I did just that. Now I discovered eSteem Surfer and found out that Steem is not just a coin but a new type of network using the blockchain. A new place to throw my voice. Small and personal. I had outgrown Facebook with all the drama and figured I would write articles based on my interests and get paid for it.

I am not in STEEM for the money. I am in it for a voice but hey, money doesn't hurt LOL.

I have followed a few members on here and they have followed me. I have upvoted them and they have upvoted me. This is nice. I got a view downvotes and some angry comments but hey, I am learning and I was forgiven.

One of the members @belemo read one of my posts that was a good 15 minute read and recommended that I post an introduction post under the introduceyourself tag. And here I am.

Currently I am looking to get back into the music scene and take pictures and video. I am looking to help bands promote through this Steem service and looking for new and exciting things to do with the blockchain. I want to give back to the community as much as I can so I figured writing blogs would be worth wild. I haven't been an avid writer since my grade school days. Probably because I was a full time drinker. Now 7 weeks sober everything is so clear and the words are just flowing out of me.

Take a look at my other posts and comment if you can. I will upvote all comments that are positive and that will help me on my journey.

Happy trails folks and see ya!

@unclemantis