Background into what makes me, me (a dork).
Huh what? You say? Well let me explain a little. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a geek, and I love to do geeky things. My wife even calls me a turbo nerd when I get going full speed. I think it’s a term of endearment. . . When I started college, I started out in Engineering Physics with an Electrical Engineering focus. At the time, I was also working as a Surveying Technician, you know, the guy that runs that weird thing with a lens on the tripod that everyone thinks is a camera. Stupid tourists. I also helped my Dad, who then and currently renovates dumpy old buildings into luxury apartments. When I figured out that Eng. Phy. wasn’t for me, I moved onto Spatial Information Engineering to see if I wanted to continue surveying for the rest of my life.
It wasn’t soon after that I realized I spent all my free time (and some homework time) doing things not related at all to what I was studying. I was spending weekends at a time building art inspired servers, or web sites, etc. So I ditched the whole engineering thing and went into a self-designed New Media program, which by the time I was ready to graduate became a full program at University of Maine, and I was one of the first to graduate with an official degree at UM in New Media. Which meant I had experience with journalism (written/photographic), lots of art and art history classes, video production, and programming (web/desktop) just to mention some of the things.
The day after commencement I moved in with my brother in Manchester to try and get a start, since Maine is pretty devoid of work in my field. For a while I consulted doing web work for start up companies. A good niche, but difficult to make money in as they too are strapped for cash, but we all seemed to understand each other so it worked out well. I also taught a few classes at Colby Sawyer involving desktop tools for digital art.
Eventually I landed a job at UNH as web developer, making college hockey season fun. After a long run there, I moved on to being an Instructional Designer blending my web and media skills to help faculty integrate technology into the classroom.
So as you can see, I have no choice but to be an uber nerd. That’s my lot in life.
