Who I Am…

Mid 1970’s, somewhere in Texas (…Dallas, it was definitely in Dallas), I came into the world kicking and screaming, probably thinking that I just need five more minutes before making my entrance. Both my parents worked for IBM so computers were part of my everyday life. When I was 2, we moved to New York because my father was transferred to the Kingston division. Shortly there after, my mother and I moved further upstate to a small town where I spent my formative years playing with, breaking and then fixing computers. I quickly learned that computers could aid my creative side. I picked up some knowledge programming in Basic and Visual Basic along with creating music using mod programs.

During college, I started working at Precision Graphics were I mostly used Photoshop to edit and clean up turbine technical drawings for General Electric. I also spent a significant amount of time learning graphics and logo creation, straight HTML programming and it was also the first time I was introduced to professional photography. I picked up a used Nikon FE2 and walked the streets of Schenectady taking pictures of everything that interested me. 

It was also the time that my family got just a little bigger by plus one son. Life became a bit more family-centric for a few years, but I still spent as much time as possible learning everything I could. I also continued writing music, even creating a label to release music under. Origin of Loss was born and was mostly just a creative outlet left to the dark recesses of my computer never to be shown in public. It wasn’t until later that I would actually release an album using Sound Cloud and Tunecore. I even make just enough royalties to buy myself a cup of coffee every once in a while.

Fast forward a bit to the end of the aughts, when I was working for J and D Walter where I took care of their whole online presence. There I met Isaac, who had a similar issue of a massive dislike working for large heartless corporations, who had skills which I lacked. Namely he was good at sales and marketing where as I was good at graphics and programming, and so we decided to work together. He created Panoramic Studios, I created Zen Core Media and from there we successfully partnered on many projects over the next eight years. Through that partnership, we expanded our services from not only website and brand management, but we got into art and museum installations. One of the more interesting exhibits was an interactive 3d rendering of the battle of Brooklyn during the revolutionary war for the Old Stone House Museum. It was a tablet controlled video that was projected onto a geographically accurate model of the landscape during the battle. This gave the battle a more tactile feel to the presentation.

At the end of our partnership, it became clear to me that while I have the skills to work on a lot of projects, I don’t have the marketing sense to sell those skills very well. I decided to move into mobile gaming in order to utilize many of the skills I learned over the years including graphics, programming and even creating music. This would hopefully allow Google’s algorithms to market for me. Unfortunately Google’s algorithms only marketed enough to cover half my expenses but I still learned much from the experience. 

In case you haven’t noticed up till this point, learning is one of my core tenets in life. Learning new things and figuring out creative ways to solve problems is one of the most rewarding aspects to my life. Technology maybe the tool I use everyday, but it’s the drive to be creative, to learn new things and try to take over the world…I mean… make the world a better place that gets me up in the morning.