About Me…
[Looking for me and not sure you got the right person? This page was originally a brief note about Gary Bajaj as the author of the web site of Eskay Business Service Centre (EBS), a family business]
Eventually this page became about my passions, interests and tech talk. Then about the person behind BITNETS (now Transcend Spectrum) as people got curious when the business won the Chamber of Commerce 2003 Info-Tech Award of Distinction in October 2003. Now it’s my personal About page. Have you indeed been looking for me?
I have always been interested in technology and am a critical thinker. My first “computer” was a CreatiVision gaming console with a BASIC interpreter cartridge and cassette tape drive. I attended classes to learn WordStar, COBOL and UNIX as soon as I was old enough and got an “IBM-compatible” PC/AT 80286. I bought software – notably the spreadsheet program Quattro Pro – for the fine manuals as a source of learning both the product, and often, use cases to which they apply.
I studied Computer Systems Technology at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) until 2001 and took a bartending and mixology certification in 2011.
I became interested in spirituality in 2009 and had a breakthrough while thinking deeply in 2012, at which time my blog developed a spiritual focus.
I got into organizing social events in February 2016 on meetup.com after having been an enthusiastic attendee for several years, so as to be able to curate the venues and quality of experiences for myself and others. This led to organizing three social groups, viz. Yonge Socialites, Exotic Food Club and Daytime Social.
I made a friend on there who was instrumental with her portfolio management proposal in inspiring me to get into stock investing as 2017 drew to a close. It felt incredible to meet up with a former OS/2 evangelist I reached out to on social media, who I had briefly spoken with in Q&A at IBM’s OS/2 Warp 3 launches in Singapore and Mumbai almost 22 years ago, and we met on his then former and my current turf.
My passion for beauty led me to pursue photography at university in the Spring of 2019. It made me realize that educational institutions like Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson U) which I had attended, are not for me as they taught me nothing about capturing beauty. A fellow student had duplicated my composition upon the model asking her to follow my lead – to which I had no issue, but hers paled (literally the opposite, considering it’s the paleness of the model I got right in addition to the inverted composition) in comparison, so she got to the teacher to make me withdraw my work under threat of being cited for plagiarism. The model that had explicitly asked that student to compose the shot as I did had her back and discredited my truth and overturned my story when I defended that I had taken the shot first. I was devalued and aggressively silenced, so I withdrew from Ryerson. I came to learn that I have an eye for curation and I leverage that to beautify my life and living space more so after the realization.
I read online extensively and since 2013 have developed understanding of diverse subjects, like medicine, nutrition and biochemistry. An understanding of Ayurvedic and biochemistry concepts, conventional wisdom, critical thinking and sharing my thoughts on social media over the years, in 2015 lead to my pursuing an online self-paced nutritional therapist certification which I got to completing during the 2020 pandemic.
I follow my passions, whatever those might be on a given day. I consider myself a generalist; technologist, photographer, curator, nutritional therapist, socials organizer and connector, visionary… you name it. These all are not that different from each other, considering my forte is intuition and critical thinking. I just put things together in my head to come up with life answers, health or technology solutions and the ability to forecast.
My definition of intuition, aka sixth sense or gut feeling is: the conclusion your subconscious draws from the sum total of all your experiences, knowledge and values. I also seem to know a lot about persons without ever having met them, which I attribute to tell-tale signs that bring up a profile of a certain type of person without consciously relating the person to anyone I have known. I call this, “predictive algorithm”, as in, my mind is honed with data samples to a point of predictive intelligence.
Business Activities
My early Internet adoption in 1995 and expertise in shared Internet hosting got me my break in the technology field in 1999 (see BITNETS on Wikipedia) providing managed e-mail hosting integrated with a client-side on-premise NTMail server with intermittent dial-up Internet and nationwide Eudora POP3 clients, serving additionally as an automated alternative to long-distance telephone lines for data transfer.
I founded BITNETS in March 1999 and it operated in cyberspace until 2002, at which time it was incorporated and we moved to new retail and office premises in a picturesque shopping plaza setting. I had offered a subset of services since 1997 operating as PagePerfect Corporation, a DTP business that was formed in the early 90s.
In January 2015 BITNETS Inc. became Transcend Spectrum Inc., a Canadian federal corporation.
I have broad experience. First as a systems administrator [having Windows, FreeBSD and MacOS experience], by definition I am an ultimate generalist of computing. I specialize in Internet technologies since communications are my passion. I apply that passion to my work, so you can with confidence entrust services that you depend on, such as messaging solutions, to Transcend Spectrum – and which confidence you can only get from a business driven by passion. I have used computers for productivity since 1987 and the Internet since 1995.
I have applied my technology skills to developing vertical solutions for the export, business services and property management businesses that I have been associated with, including business process documentation and technical writing.
Besides technology, I have management experience since 1988 and accounting experience since 1990. EBS was a facility offering executive suites and business services, and was renowned in its time as an incubator to many small businesses. That is where I picked up on legal and writing skills and gained experience, working with my father who, had he chosen to be a professional, would have definitely made a good solicitor. My writing skills improved when I took business courses at NAIT.
I have always worked smart by deploying two key elements, automation and delegation. I try to not micro-manage everything, but usually end up doing so if I find things are not being done right and in a timely fashion. I take my responsibility very seriously, to my own detriment in my personal life. I have a no-nonsense management style that keeps Transcend Spectrum operating efficiently and able to deliver quality service on time while being cost effective.
I consider myself to be an honest and conscientious person, which is why the way I choose to run the business, our commitment to consulting as opposed to value added reselling in the guise of consulting exceeds the ethical standards of both the Better Business Bureau, the Canadian Information Processing Society and likely any other professional association.
Most of my business decisions are made on intuition, not financial sense. I choose to not override the inner voice with logic and economics.
I can go off on tangents talking about experiences, and employees at BITNETS who have worked closely with me would bear witness to the many stories I have to tell. I seem to be good at analogies. I try to pass on lessons I have learnt from life to anyone who is interested, and continuously try to learn from my own as well as others’ mistakes.
- My Résumé