The
Ubiquitous, Inevitable Bio Page
On the Internet,
you can't work your way through a personal web site without learning
more than you ever wanted to about the blatherin'  author. ...as if every geek who manages to hack out a few web pages
feels he's an individual you simply have to meet, instead
of just another number, cast from the same mold that has spawned
geeks since the abacus gave over to Napier's Bones and then to
the slide rule. Well, guess
what? With malice aforethought, I'm going to do it, too.
Before we
get in too deep, the pictures on this page are a few that I've
picked out for little better reason than to keep this narrative
from becoming an ugly wall of text. Each picture is captioned.
Simply run your mouse over the picture to "pop" the caption up.
If the caption goes away, either vow to read faster next time,
or move your mouse away and then back again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So
let's see, who am I, where did I come from, and how the hell did
I get this way?
Keeping to the
high points, I was born
in Honolulu, Hawaii (the son of a sailor!). I spent my early
childhood living in the sand and salt of the Pacific ocean. As a
Navy brat, I moved about every eighteen months during most of my
childhood, up until I was about 15.
Taking a
break from strict chonology, at one time or another I've lived
in Hawaii, Virginia, California, South Carolina, Colorado, Florida,
Georgia, Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas (bleah, eh?).
Many of those states I lived in twice. A number of them I hit
three times. In many of them, I moved within the state a time
or two before we moved on to the next one. I've lived in Virginia
at four different times and probably a dozen different addresses.
I was the "new kid" in school almost every year of my life. In retrospect, for much of my young adult and adult life, that imparted to me a reticence to rapidly make friends and an unfortunately casual attitude about leaving friends and acquaintances behind as I left to live somewhere new.
Looking back,
I wouldn't have changed a thing, though that wasn't always the
case.
My Dad retired as a Commander in the U.S. Navy when I was 15, and we moved to a small town in Ludington, Michigan (pop. ~10,000). Calling the adjustment "culture shock" would be an understatement. Our family had never lived anywhere more than about a year and a half and had never lived in a neighborhood where everyone else wasn't in the same boat (we always lived on a Naval base or in a community consisting of military families). In Ludington, we moved to a town where it wasn't uncommon for people to be born, grow-up, marry, work, and retire without ever moving more than 5 miles outside of the city limits. The occasional person who left to find work in Grand Rapids, MI, 100 miles away had seemingly moved to the other side of the planet.
That said, it was a great place to grow through adolescence and a great community, once you got past the 4-year stint of being the new kid on the block! (In fairness, one must understand that the condition was undoubtedly exacerbated by my having grown into somewhat of an introvert by that time and my young sister, who's the paragon of extrovertedness, had no such problems finding her place amongst her peer group).
After managing
to bluff my way through Ludinton's well-rated high school with virtually effortless excellence,
I left for college. I spent two years at a small college called "Grand Valley State College,"
in Allendale, MI (just outside of Grand Rapids), where, having never developed any study habits in high school,
I did little but stress the hell out of my lungs and kidneys while
completely failing to academically impress either my professors
or myself. About the only thing I demonstrated during this period was that the young adult male is only barely achieving sentience at that age, and usually bent on proving to all and sundry that he's virtually immortal. Whatever Saint is tasked with looking over fools and young college students must have put in for a raise while I was a Freshman. You would probably have to dig deep into a thesaurus to adequately describe
the despair my folks probably felt at having raised such a slacker.
But I found college's force-feed-'em doctrine a stifling and inefficient
way to learn the stuff that (I thought at the time) really mattered. So, after enduring two years in an environment where
young adults were encouraged to memorize rather than think, I decided a sabatical was in order, once again sending my parents
scrambling for Roget's little helper. I packed my bags, left
campus at the end of my sophmore year and moved to
Denver on a whim.
A year's
worth of jobs like bartending, ditch digging and selling cars
was all it took to realize that no degree meant no ducats for
a young man long on idealism but short on hard skills. Such was
the challenge of having a Jack of all Trades approach to
life. At that age, I lacked the seasoning necessary to sit in
an interview and convince the corporate interrogator that I'd
learned and internalized more heuristically than most people take
away from college, and the rest I could figure out quickly and
on the fly. --Well, it still ain't an easy sell, but since
I own my own business now, it doesn't matter. At the time, of
course, it was cocky and naive.
However,
there are professions for cocky, young, immortal men. So, at the
gung-ho age of 22, I went to see my Army recruiter. “Kevin,” he
said to me after perusing my test scores (lucky for me, the
ASFAB tests are aimed right at the "Jack of All Trades" character
type!), “you are qualified for any job the Army has, and I'll guarantee you get it; just sign ri-i-i-ght here.” And I
did. And, being (as they say) "young, dumb and fulla cum," I chose
as my military occupational specialty, the Queen of Battle: Infantry.
I was, after all, a young stud wasn't I? As hard and tough as they came? And hadn't I survived reading uncountable adventure books in my youth? Bah! If my literary heroes could do it, so could I! Only later in my adult life did I draw the insight that the word
stud is really a contraction of stupid, and a very
canny establishment probably passed a law somewhere that it be
spelled without the apostrophe for ever and ever, amen, so as
to not clue in young, potential Army recruits!
It was an
excellent career choice. To keep this from becoming lengthier
than is already destined, let's just say I did well. I was the Distinguished Honor Graduate in my Infantry basic and
advanced individual training (AIT) company of some 200+ new soldiers, was selected for Officer Candidate
School (OCS), graduated on the Commandant's list, and pinned on my butter bar (2nd
Lieutenant) about eighteen months after my initial entry date.
I'd arrived with impossbily long hair and barely enough self-discipline
to hold a job and been transformed from a teenage twit (though,
yeah, I was in my twenties by then) into a leader of men, a soldier. I had arrived into a
profession I consider one of the most rewarding in the world--right
alongside being a good father. As an newbie officer, I went to the Infantry Officer Basic Couse (Commandant's list graduate again) and Airborne School.
My first duty assignment as a young Second Lieutenant was at Fort Irwin, CA, where I served with the U.S. Army's OPFOR--the best mechanized maneuver unit the Army has. In the OPFOR, we literally HAD to be the best. Every other combat mech unit in the Army came to Ft. Irwin to train (at great expense) and the experience had to be a learning one. The best way to teach people lessons in an environment where making mistakes gets people killed is to make the training realistic, hard, and then show them with perfect clarity what happens when they fail to fight effectively, with minimal error.
While in the OPFOR, I served as a Platoon
Leader, a Company Executive Officer, and then the Battalion Maintenance
Officer of the Infantry's largest mechanized battalion. I then returned to
Fort Benning, Georgia for the Infantry Officer Advanced Course (Commandant's list, again),
and then got a chance to finish my degree (B.S., Business Management), by going to the University of South Flordia on a "bootstrap" program. Upon graduation, I
transferred to Fort Carson, CO, where I served initially as a
Mech Infantry Battalion's S-3 Air (Assistant to the Battalion
Operations, Plans, and Training Officer), and then got my Company
Command. During this period I'm proud to say I took 123 men to Saudi Arabia, where
we gracefully collected our hostile fire pay for securing a
Patriot Missile Battalion that was spread across 1100 kilometers
of desert. It was primarily a counter-terrorist mission and we were never tested. We brought our soldiers all home safely.
After my Company
Command, I decided I'd had my fun as a soldier after ten and a
half years of hard charging and leaning forward in the foxhole.
Any time any young person
wants to talk about military life or consider going into it, I'm all for it. It was a great
experience and I recommend it for anyone with a hunger for adventure
and a thirst for challenge, who's willing to strive for the excellence
demanded when your competence is a life and death matter. Like
many of the other “best things in life,” it's a profession where
you get out of it what you put into it. (As an aside, anytime
you run into some puss who speaks negatively about their military
experiences, ya oughta view that as more a reflection on them
than it is on our military.)
During this ten-year period, I was married and divorced. Life's
too short to stick with a bad draw.
Around 1990,
I got involved in what I still consider to be one of the finest
massively multiplayer online games ever designed: Air Warrior,
developed by Kesmai Corporation. Air Warrior was a World War II
air combat simulation and if ever there was a game that brought
out the Walter Mitty in a man, that was it. Though only a source
of recreation at this point in my life, participation in that
online community played a pivotal role in my life.
I left the
Army in 1993. Following my becoming a civilian again, I fell into
rent-to-own store management--in retrospect, the most miserable
job I've ever had. Like most ex-military, the year following my
leaving the service was a trying one. It took me awhile to figure
out how to translate the skills associated with influencing people
toward achieving a mission of closing with and killing an enemy
into something that could be communicated to corporate America
without making an interviewer's face grow pale. The hours while
I ran my own corporate store were damn near as demanding as those
required from an Army combat arms officer--and the work at times
seemed more dangerous! That's probably hard to imagine unless
you've ever gone into a city's Projects at 8pm on a Friday night,
to have someone hand you a cash payment in front of several hundred
hungry eyes...It was a career choice I do not recommend
for anyone to whom pride in profession is a significant part of
their personal identity--as it is most men.
However,
such period in life are all part of paying one's dues and for those who will work for it, everything will always turn out for the best. While working my ass off in this new
career, I met the lady who would become my life partner, proving
that even times seemingly overshadowed by dark clouds have silver linings. After managing
stores for two years (which, by the way, did extremely well, despite my personal
feelings about the industry) I managed to weasel my way from the
retail trenches to the safety and comfort of the corporate I.T.
department. I put in hell-time on their Help Desk before moving
through the positions of Field Automation Analyst and LAN Systems
Analyst. While scrambling up the learning curve required for designing,
administering, and upgrading a 1400 server WAN tying together
store LANs comprised of Solaris x86 UNIX servers (believe it or
not!) and Windows95 workstations, I convinced Debbie, the aforementioned life partner, to become my wife. I was transferred from
Cincinnati to Wichita, KS.
On the leisure
side, I'd "risen" from the Air Warrior player ranks and was helping
to teach virtual air combat tactics to new pilots (affectionately
called "dweebs"). My involvement in the Air Warrior community
resulted in my being offered a job at Kesmai in the Fall of 1997.
So back to the East Coast we moved. There, I was tasked with the
mission to build their Customer Service center for GameStorm,
Kesmai Corporation's fledgling online game service. Being lucky
enough to find talented and dedicated people and cajole them into
working for me over the next couple of years resulted in our building
a game support organization that received accolades from customers
and from industry trade rags. I moved through the titles of Manager, then Director,
then into the role of Vice President of Customer Support during this period.
During this time, we established Debbie as the sole-proprietor of Internet Payment Solutions ("PayByCash.com"). PayByCash™ was an Internet business which provided online merchants with the ability to easily and profitably accept non-credit-card payments--something that few businesses could affordably to back in 1997. The next two years were a blur. Debbie worked 7-days a week taking care of the business's customers and providing the kind of unmatched customer care that wins customers for life and grows small businesses into big ones, and I worked 12 hour days for Kesmai (which is not a complaint at all. I was having a blast and that kind of full-bore commitment is simply the only speed at which I work--hard and fast.
Somehow during this period, Debbie and I managed to conceive.
In November,
1999, we became the proud parents of twins: one boy, one girl. As
I write (update!) this, with them approaching their fifth birthday, I've been forced to recognize that while they're not yet smarter than I am (though no doubt that is coming), they're much more cunning. Each probably has at least one of Machiavelli's genes, since they ultimately always seem to get what they want most of the time. Still, we endeavor to do the best I can by them and they're growing up as well-adjusted, happy, nicely disciplined kids.
:-) ...and anyone who has or has had kids understands that having
twins means I don't have much time to write more about them right
now! Twice the fun, half the time to brag! Besides, they have
their own web pages, somewhere on this site!
Kesmai was
acquired by Electronic Arts early in 2000. My role between the
acquisition and my scampering down the hawser of the EA ship changed
several times while that company flailed about trying to monetize
the talent they acquired with Kesmai. The time was filled with
disappointing, unfortunate, and uncalled-for changes in Kesmai's
wonderful culture, a deviation from business practices required
for success in the subscription online games industry and an organizational disinclination
to grok those things required to successfully publish compelling
games for a multiplayer gaming service. I will not write more
about this until time has contributed more perspective than I'm
able to summon right now. For the most part, I worked as Director, Customer Support Technologies and Services while with EA.com. My job, having handed over the job of managing the technical support department to my right-hand man, was to develop the customer and community support tools and technologies that EA would need in order to grow to almost unimagineable scales.
 In October, 2001, I completed my Magnum Opus for Electronic Arts--the design and project leadership over a proprietary application which grreatly improved EA's ability to provide the kind of high-quality, responsive customer and community care in their widely diverse massively multiplayer games. Having declared my intent to leave back in July of that year, I did so, and joined Debbie in running our growing business with the intent to turn it into a globally recognized brand.
It's
now April, 2004, and I've been in business for myself, with
my wife, for more than two years. Business is good. Really
good! We've grown more than 400% since 2002 and our growth
continues to be steady. While
most dot coms went the way of the dodo, we've continued to be
profitable and, as the song says, the future's so bright we have
to wear shades.
And
that, in a (damned large) nutshell, is who I am and how
I got to be this way. If you actually read this far, thanks for
sticking around. I hope this--and the rest of my Web site--has
given or will give you some entertainment. Feel encouraged to
drop me a line and let me know.
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