I'm a true Rhode Islander who currently lives in North Providence. I have an amazing 12 year old daughter and a betta fish named Sakana Pi.

Technical Background

I learned to program by teching myself BASIC on a Commodore 64 when I was 11.  I was an early fan of online services, connecting to Q-LINK (which later became AOL) with my 300 baud cartridge modem. I spent the next few years hopping around BBSs in the Providence area during my early teens, and had memberships to AOL and Prodigy.

I created my first web page in 1995 and was quite impressed with myself for getting javascript rollovers to work properly.   I spent the couple years in the IT side of the industry, putting together PCs and doing hardware and network troubleshooting for companies like GTECH. It was the height of the first tech bubble, I was 19 years old with no college degree, and I landed a job at NBC as a System Administrator for the Providence TV station,  WJAR 10.  After a couple years of dealing with down servers and laptops that refused to stay connected to the network, I made the jump to Web Developer and began to work on TurnTo10.com, mainly working in Classic ASP, HTML and Javascript.

I then left and started my own company - Unified Media - and provided web development, design and consulting to several companies located all over the world.  It was then that I picked up PHP and honed my skills at estimating projects, and dealing with clients in a sales capacity.  After modest success (if you define success as "not starving to death") for a couple years, I noticed a listing for a job with Retail Decisions where I worked for about 4 years as a web applications developer for some househopld name companies.  During this time I made my way back to Microsoft technologies and dove headfirst into .NET and ASP.NET, which is my development platform of choice.

Martial Arts Background

Studying martial arts is one of the things I'm most passionate about in life.  I have been studying Oki Ryu Kempo for about 10 years.  Oki Ryu is on offshoot of American Kempo in the Nick Cerio lineage.  The focus of the art is to end a confrontation as quickly as possible using a variety of techniques.  We incorporate some circular blocking from kung fu, straight striking from Okinawan karate, and jiu jitsu techniques as well.  I currently hold the rank of 2nd Degree Black Belt.