Born: in Rochester, NY on September 6th, 1974
Raised: In and around the Rochester area all my life. Rochester, Penfield, East Rochester, Fairport, Honeoye, Bloomfield, Sodus.
Graduated: From Sodus Central School with a Regents diploma in Music and History in 1992
College: Attended Monroe Community College for one year, studying Music Theory, Music History, Anthropology, and Piano. Studied Percussion and Marimba at the Hochstien School of Music. Currently attending University of Phoenix, studying to complete an Associates degree in Information Technology, Web Design.
Professional Studies: Attended the Academy for Career Development, a career training school on Mt. Hope Ave. in Rochester, where I was trained to be a PC tech. The goal of the program was to obtain a CompTIA A+ Certification.
After leaving college, I spent much of my young adulthood playing drums in various musical settings. I played in a tribute to RUSH for three years, after which I continued on with the bass player from that band to form Sorcery Surreal, an original progressive rock band. The tribute played gigs all over the north east part of the country including Cleveland, OH, Springfield MA and State College PA.During that time, I was working in odd jobs in plastics factories and other minimum wage jobs. I eventually got a contract job at Webster Tool and Die where my boss took me aside and told me I was too smart for the work they were giving me. He marched me down to the machine shop and I began a career as a professional sheetmetal fabricator (or “tin-knocker,” as the expression goes). This was my first introduction to skilled trades and my first step down the path of a real career, because playing music professionally was ruining the joy of playing at all.
This was also, to my chagrin, my reintroduction to the world of mathematics, as being a “tin-knocker” is all about bending, which is all about angles. Remember that Trigonometry you said you’d never do anything with? Well, it was back with a vengeance. Bend allowances, trig, and calculating screw thread geometry. Mathematics had become my livelihood.
In time, I would leave Webster Tool and Die and go to work for Rochester Instrument Systems, a recording and measuring instruments manufacturer specializing in custom-designed products for customers. It was here that I began programming CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) punch-fabricator machines, which take raw sheetmetal stock and punch out the first manufactured state of a given sheetmetal product. This experience recalled my early childhood fascination with computers, back when my computer of choice was a Commodore 64.
Programming CNC machines was part GUI manipulation, part scripting. There was a CAD-style interface that would take a CAD drawing as a base and allow you to program what punches (there are twenty or so punches of various shapes and sizes loaded in a turret on the CNC fabricator machine) would punch where and how many times. One of the difficult parts was taking a one-peice blueprint and converting that to a layout of several parts on a sheet, all delicately connected to one another to reduce waste and often connected together by a .010″ section of metal. This part often required or could be aided by the introduction of scripting programs that I was able to program. The scripting language used on fabricators is entirely proprietary, but they pass information between a computer and the “brain” of the CNC through conventional TCP/IP communications. All this working with computers made me realize that perhaps there was something else I should be doing.
Then, during the particularly bad economic times in 2000, my company was bought out and liquidated. I lost my job and was told by the State of New York Unemployment Insurance Department that they didn’t expect to find me a job in the next year because manufacturing jobs were so scarce. That being the case, I enrolled in the Academy for Career Development to begin work as an IT professional.
Current Career
While attending the Academy for Career Development’s apprenticeship program, learning how to disassemble and repair PCs and networks, I got my first job in the IT industry at Sutherland Global Services as a Tech Support rep for Comcast Broadband. After a few months of that job, my boss took notice of me and grabbed me for his newest account, Gateway Computers. This was a big account for the company, they wanted people who were proven performers and I had been the top call taker on the Comcast desk.
While working on the Gateway desk, we had need of a web designer to run the team’s home page. Nothing too fancy, but what was needed was a constantly-updated page with all the latest news, tech information, policy changes and sales information so the team could do it’s job effectively. Since I had a bit of training in basic HTML and was quick enough on the phone that I could easily balance both phone queue and web design duties, I was given the job.
This was my introduction to fast-paced, production environment design. Granted, I did not yet do dynamic programming with PHP or anything else, but I got used to the idea of needing a new page or a new section and needing to design and launch it in a matter of hours. Updates and news could not wait even that long, and without a dynamic interface, I was forced to constantly update the static HTML pages that I had.
All of this constant movement pushed me to learn more and more new things. It was in this time that I began to work with Flash, which was a quick and dirty way to create animated buttons. I also began learning JavaScript. I also acquired DragonFlyEye.Net and HolisticNetworking.net during this time to use as test-beds for my learning.
But it was when I got my job at Unisys that the education really began. At Unisys, they had something called Unisys University, which was a website filled to over-flowing with online books and CBTs that were free for Unisys employees to use as they saw fit. I took every CBT I could that looked interesting to me, including Java programming basics, database design concepts, SharePoint Portal administration and ASP.NET programming basics. I also received my CompTIA Security+ and Network+ Certifications through Unisys. Best of all, I had been slowly coming to the realization that PHP and MySQL would be the best solutions for creating web pages for what I wanted, and Unisys University had loads books on these subjects.
I worked for a short time from home for a company called Transcend Medical Services. My job there was basically a catch-all system administrator job, doing everything from bouncing servers that got hung up to fixing software issues for transcriptionists to correcting technical problems our customers were experiencing with their software. Once again, my web development skills were called upon to provide some much-needed online process documentation for other techs and a few other odds and ends. This time, the job was done with a bit of my PHP skills for some projects and a bit of SharePoint development for other projects. We maintained a file management system with a lot of information on it on SharePoint since the system was build on Windows 2000 and Data Center servers.
After working at Transcend, I got my first real job in web design, exclusively, at Eastman Kodak. This job required me to take compositional PSD files and turn them into functioning websites, using a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript/AJAX. There is also a bit of Java and JHTML to be done in this job, along with dealing directly with the UNIX file system through either PuTTY or some proprietary file transfer systems.
