Pat Giacobbe is an IT services and solutions professional, tech & mechanical blogger, car enthusiast, and entrepreneur. He is 39 years old, lives in New Jersey, and frequently spends time working on his cars. Pat is also the owner of Pat's IT Solutions, LLC, an IT Services and Solutions Provider based in New Jersey and he has been in the industry for 20+ years.
Pat has worked for a number of IT companies in the past and has branched out on his own to give clients a more personalized experience instead of feeling like a number. He has helped many clients to create customized solutions for their specific line of business. Pat's IT Solutions has experience in the healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, retail, fine dining point-of-sale equipment, specialized network configurations, WiFi solutions, etc. He has the experience needed to solve your IT issues today.
Pat's IT Solutions is an authorized reseller of the following products, but not limited to, Absolute, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, Seagate, StarTech, Wasabi, etc.
We utilize 3d printing for some of our custom mounting brackets as well as a ton of open source applications/projects to create and automate custom solutions for our clients.
Backstory of vertigoisabitch.com (if you wanted to know):
Some of you may want to know the backstory on the blog name. It's pretty simple actually. One day I wasn't looking and smashed the front of my head on a beam. Six months and several scans later, neurologists would say I had a mild TBI. That's not the type of TBI you get when you're in a car crash but it's more along the lines of a light tap (in doctor terms). It sure as shit didn't feel light when it happened. Bed rest, dark rooms, no sounds, no visuals, no contact with the outside world, and most importantly no screens was the prescribed regimen. It's not like you could look at a screen and feel fine, you'd be nauseous, ill feeling, dizzy, malaise, colors in your vision that weren't really there, etc. Being the owner of a computer company requires you to be in front of a screen in some capacity throughout the day. At this point I had just branched off on my own and was starting to amass clients. About 8 months in most of the symptoms had faded away except some occasional dizziness where the floor felt like it was moving, etc.
Once you have a concussion it's super easy to receive another one with a relatively light blow to the head. Needless to say, it happened again a few months later. This time while working on a car I stood up rather quickly and snapped the left side of my head/neck on the side mirror. It's weight of my body being propelled by my legs instantly straight up at what seemed like Mach 1 with the left side of my head smashing into the driver's side mirror at full force. My head and neck were sore for days. All of the symptoms came back only this time they were laced with fear, anxiety, panic, derealization, visual artifacts, constant high pitched tinnitus, and adrenaline dumps to name a few. Other times you would feel like you'd space out for no reason and not remember the last second or two, a lagging input of information from your eyes to your brain like there's a delay in processing, being able to communicate the right word at the right time was not there. I could see the word I wanted to say in my head, I knew how to use the word, and I knew what the word meant, I just couldn't speak it. It's like looking for the word in your head and it not being there. Trying to have conversations sucked, more tests had to be done to confirm a diagnosis, new neurologists were sought out and new medicines were started.
About two years later I would be involved in a motor vehicle accident which caused a third concussion due to a young driver being distracted by his phone and not paying attention to the road which cause him to slam into the back of our car. I was beyond frustrated at this point. Prior to pinpointing the exact issue, the symptoms lasted in some form or another for two plus years.
Thankfully I was prescribed nerve blocking agents which gave me my life back. Symptoms have diminished down to one to two days a month vs every single day for weeks.
In the end I was finally diagnosed with vestibular migraines. These are migraines that may or may not have a headache accompanying it, but include the feelings of floating, dizziness, lagging, weak legs, feeling like you're going to pass out but never do, visual disturbances (can be triggered almost immediately by repeating patterns), anxiety, waves of panic, waves of adrenaline rushes, etc. Life goes on and you power through most of it.
I created this blog mainly as an area to store my sequences and how to's for computer related things. It serves as a repository for ideas, fixes, and notes relating to my IT work and cars.
Also make sure you're wearing a hard hat while working. You never know what could happen.
If you have any questions about IT or would like to hire us (support [at] patsit [dot] com), '68-'82 Corvettes, or head injuries, I'm your guy.
Happy vetting,
-Pat