Moose is the Supergeek

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Batteries Included - People powering the new economy

THE SUPERGEEK

Michael "Moose" Dinn, president and owner, Twisted Pair Network Consulting Inc., Halifax, N.S., www.twistedpair.ca

Michael Dinn has a simple explanation for how he got stuck with his nickname, Moose. "I was 11 years old and playing soccer," he says. "I ran through a few other players and got the nickname."

It might not be a flashy anecdote, but Dinn, who is known only to his family as Michael, has always been able to make the practical seem innovative; he has earned a McGyver-style reputation in the IT world for improvising solutions to the networking problems. "I got known as the guy who could roll the duct tape and a piece of wire and come up with something that would work."

Glimpses of a bright future were apparent early on. In 1992, while Dinn was still a student at Dalhousie, he set up a Gopher server for the university - a precursor to the Web for serving up Internet information without graphics. Unfortunately, management was the last to discover the popular service and Dinn was warned, "Don't do that again without asking us - but can you put these documents on it for us?"

In 1993, the third-year computer-science student was recruited to join NSTN, the first commercial ISP in Nova Scotia. And the rest, he says - from setting up close to 20 other ISPs, two of which are in Ireland, to providing second-level IT services to companies throughout Canada - is history.

The techie-turned-entrepreneur started Twisted Pair in 1998. "It's the ultimate network consulting, hosting, all-singing, all-dancing, you-name-it, we'll-do-it company," Dinn says. The once-independent techie may have three employees now, but he still gets a rush from the "wow" factor. "I like giving customers a solution that they never would have thought about doing themselves," he says, "that saves them hideous amounts of money, that makes them say 'wow.'"