Bio
I was born in 1975 in Washington State to German parents who waited all of two weeks before moving us back to a village outside Nürnberg, where I spent the next two years learning rudimentary German Language and walking skills.
We returned to the States and settled in one of the nicer parts of Everett, Washington, where I lived until I left for college in 1993. After college I spent another year trying to learn to like living in Southern California, but ultimately conceded defeat and returned to the Northwest to put down roots in my current hometown of Bellingham.
I have been interested in engineering and technology for as long as I can remember. In grade school I was writing BASIC programs and taking apart gadgets, and in high school tried to teach myself electronics with limited success. In college I studied engineering, with a focus on computers and microprocessor-based systems. After earning my degree I took a job writing embedded software for (among other things) electric car fast-charging equipment. I moved on to studying vehicle design in a post-bacc program, during which I fell in with a bunch of very cool computer nerds, ultimately landing my current job programming web applications in PHP.
In my spare time I’ve been working on a couple of electric vehicle projects: converting a 1969 VW to electric propulsion, and building an electric skateboard with a weight-sensing control system. (In the past I’ve also flirted with the Dark Side, having turned a mild-mannered 103-horsepower grocery-getter into a tight-handling all-wheel-drive turbocharged beast that ultimately put out around 300 horsepower at the wheels). My other major time-, money- and gumption-sink is maintaining and renovating the 90-year-old bungalow I bought back in 2002.
In addition I have countless hobbies and interests where I haven’t progressed beyond the level of rank amateur, among them: rock climbing, mountain biking, unicycling, motorcycling, snowboarding, time-speed-distance rallying, autocrossing, Macintosh programming, coffee roasting, scuba diving, guitar and piano playing, orienteering, disc golfing, and building little mechanical contraptions to solve specific problems.
I built this site to help hone my web design and writing skills while documenting the handful of good ideas and vast number of bad ideas that fall out of my brain with pleasing regularity, and I sincerely hope you enjoy your browsing-related program activities in my little corner of the Web.