About Me
I’m originally from Spokane, WA. If you're going to be a kid, Spokane's not a bad place for it. Quiet, peaceful, stable—kind of a small town, except with malls and a few not-quite-completely-out-of-place buddings of culture: a symphony, a ballet, a couple of theater troupes. But small-town conservative, small-town provincial.
As high school graduation loomed, my desire to see more of the world grew. Spokane was home to a prominent air force base and it was completely land-locked. So, naturally , I joined the Navy. They sent me to a tropical island in the middle of nowhere, where I languished for two years, fixing state-of-the-art radio equipment in a modern, twelve-story air traffic control tower that—on a busy day maybe had to deal with four aircraft.
Your tax dollars at work.
Inevitably, I moved back to Spokane. Quiet, stable, friendly, safe, boring, stagnant, hapless, moribund Spokane. About all it had going for it was that I would be close to family. Here, I ended up working for an audio/visual company. In retrospect, that still stands out as a surreal career choice (Seriously, how many people do you know that can list "A/V nerd" on a résumé?). Finally, a dental hygienist talked me into going back to school, which meant it was time for a change. A big change.
I put Spokane in my rear-view mirror and headed to Seattle and the UW, where I got my degree in Technical Communication.
Incidentally, I've noticed that as much as I used to mock Seattleites for their paralyzing fear of snow, I've found that I don’t mind so much staying home for three days every winter when fully half of Seattle commuters abandon their cars in an inch and a half of snow.
Snow and ice. Nature's little refresher lesson in physics.
Since I graduated from the UW, I’ve been writing user documentation for software companies (and yes, that is every bit as exciting as it sounds). My first software company gig was at AspenTech, which, if you're not an engineer, you've probably never heard of. Though I'll swear I saw AspenTech software running on the distillery floor at Bushmills (which is actually English whiskey, crafted in the Irish style. Make mine a Jameson, please. Tanks very much.).
For a few years, I was at Microsoft, where I’ve done surprisingly exciting work for Zune, Xbox, Expression Web (and it's corollary site, ExpressionIQ, Visual Studio, and Outlook, Word, and Excel.
Outside of the day-to-day, in my spare time, I compose and record original music, the highlight of which has been a few paying jobs. Because, if you're going to have a hobby, try to pick one that pays for itself.
About the image...
A bay in Alaska, right before the humpback whales started herding herring. Shot with a consumer Canon A50.