About
Werner Heisenberg pointed out in 1927 the impossibility of measuring both position and momentum simultaneously. Thankfully people (in terms of who someone “really is”) aren’t easily measured based on single moments. It is rather the arc of persons life which provides insight into who they really are.
Birth
My life started in Belleville, NJ in 1976. I was born to an exceedingly well-traveled American woman who speaks 7 languages, and an equally well-traveled Australian born man. My mother holds two masters degrees. My father never finished high-school.
Adolescence
I grew up in northern New Jersey, in the suburbs of New York City (12 miles west to be exact). I led a relatively normal modern-day suburban life I suppose. My parents divorced when I was 5. My mother re-married and re-divorced. I won state medals in martial arts around age 8. I was an adventurous and curious young boy who really, really loved bikes and MacGuyver.
Teenager
At age 14, after 3 years of dispassionate clarinet playing, I fell in love with a trombone player my same age who got me interested in really learning to play my instrument. By the time I was 16 I had won myself quite a reputation among clarinet players in New Jersey and had taken to spending my weekends playing symphonic music with students at the Juilliard School as a member of the New York State Youth Orchestra.
College - Montclair State University
I grew bored of music as a profession. I wasn’t interested in being a high-school music teacher and didn’t like the odds of being a successful and well-paid performer. So, I found inspiration in my love for another woman. This, in a cataclysmic shift away from music which came to a head during a 3 week trip to Europe, led me to study biology.
I liked biology quite a bit. I found epidemiology and virology very interesting. Movies like Outbreak and the myriad hospital dramas on prime-time TV at the time no doubt had an influence on me. I studied biology at Montclair State University for a year before transferring to Boston University.
College - Boston University
In Boston I joined the crew team as a walk-on freshman. I spoke with Rodney Pratt, the men’s head crew coach during an exploratory visit the summer before I matriculated. I asked Rodney “What should I expect from rowing?”. He simply said, “Expect to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life.” If anything, he was being gentle.
I rowed for two and a half years. I spent those two years working out close to eight hours a day, nine months out of the year and trying desperately to stay awake in classes. My grades dropped off a bit. But I managed to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in biology in May of 1999.
First Experiences With The Internet
During the 1997-1998 school year I had a physics professor who, luckily for me, asked his class to prepare a report on some topic or another. But instead of presenting it as a conventional report, he wanted us to prepare it in the form of a web-page. This is where my involvement with computers began.
Getting My Chops Together
From there I fiddled with building web-pages until my graduation. At that point I managed to find a job building web-sites for a very small marketing and advertising agency in Wakefield, MA. I learned a great deal during the nearly a year that I held that job before deciding to start a web-development company called Cyzygy Multimedia (good luck with the pronunciation).
Cyzygy started off wonderfully and died, in my opinion due to a lack of focus on our core customers. That’s as big a mistake as can be made. I left the company in search of greener pastures, which I found in the form of Azurn Networks.
Azurn is where I met Joel Melby. Joel had worked for the air force for 13 years building missile guidance systems. He followed that up with some interesting work in the wireless space. Joel was a great mentor to me, teaching me, a know-nothing know-it-all just how much I had to learn. He was very supportive however and encouraged me to continue learning through experiment. Joel was very fond of his alma-mater, Cornell University. And I was always impressed with the fact that he had graduated from an Ivy League school with a degree in engineering no-less.
Jessica
During my time with Azurn I met Jessica Evans, nee Holmes. We quickly became friends and slowly became more. About a year later Jessica was accepted to study Historic Preservation at Cornell University. So, she and I packed up and moved to Newfield, New York, just outside of Ithaca.
We lived in Newfield for one year with our two cats Forrest (the fat) and Gizmo (the crazy). In November I proposed. In June we married and I started working for Cornell.
Delta Gamma
The following August we, the happy couple were presented with an opportunity to live at the Delta Gamma Chi Chapter at Cornell as house directors. Out job was to make sure the house didn’t fall down. And it wasn’t always easy. We met a lot of dynamic and interesting women through that experience.
Cornell
One of the benefits of working in higher education is the ability to take classes for free. After working for Cornell for a few months I was able to start taking classes toward a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science. It took me three years to complete the one year program, all the while working full-time, managing my responsibilities as house-dad for 49 19-year-old women, trying to be a good husband and during my last two semesters, father. It nearly killed me. But I’m still married, and now nothing seems hard.
Milo
A little over a year after moving to Delta Gamma Jess and I found out we were going to be parents. In December of 2005 our son Milo was born.
Milo greatly enjoyed the attention of the 49 women living in the house. And they seemed to share that enjoyment.
Fall Creek
After two and a half years at DG though we were ready to put down some roots and expand into a larger space. So, we moved out and moved on finding the Fall Creek neighborhood of Ithaca the right place to settle.
Here and Now
This brings me to the current day. Life is as good as it has ever been. The past 30 years have taught me much. And as is so often the case, the lesson I have learned most well is how much I have left to learn.