ike the free wheeling Guns 'n' Roses guitarist from whom he borrowed his onscreen name, 18-year-old Damian Ionut-Adrei, better known as Slash, hopes to rock the world with his Internet savvy. Although Damian possesses no more information than many garden-variety Netheads, his quest for technical information was a long, hard battle. Having grown up in Romania, a country once ruled by the most brutal totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe, Damian did not have access to the learning tools many people in the West take for granted.

What Damian did have was several computers and, more importantly, some telecommunications equipment, donated to his high school by the Soros Foundation. With mouse in hand, Damian set out to learn the Net. "When I first started to use email three years ago, there was no Internet instruction book in Romanian. My only resource was the Internet itself." Today, after hundreds of hours spent surfing the Net and exchanging information about Romania in return for online tutorials, Damian is a self-styled Web evangelist who now passes on his programming and network management skills to other students. His computer cronies, who call themselves the Shock Team have come a long way with their new found knowledge. At first, they used their know-how to play typical computer pranks; now, the Shock Team specializes in debugging local computer systems. Many of the team members are planning for a career in systems management, a career that they may never have dreamed of if it hadn't been for Slash.