Summary

I live in Austin, TX.  My favorite pasttime is playing music.  I play drums with several bands in Austin.  I also enjoy working with computers.  I'm a software jockey by training, but I also use computers to record and make music. 

This page gives a brief background of my life.  If you are looking for my resume, please go to my resume page.  If you are interested in my musical experience, visit my music page.

Background 

I was born in Houston, Texas, USA in 1970.  I was preceded 2 years prior by my sister, my only sibling   My father worked for IBM while I was growing up and his job took our family to Atlanta, Georgia for a few years and Mobile, Alabama for a few years before we moved back to Texas.   We moved from Mobile to San Antonio, Texas when I was 9 years old.  I grew up the rest of my childhood there in the house my parents still live in today.  It was the suburbs.  It still is.

My mother and father are both creative people.  My father played guitar and sang songs all the time growing up.  At family get-togethers, he and my uncle would sing and play for the whole family (and still do from time to time).  Eventually they taught me a few things and I joined in before long.  That's how I learned to play music.  My mother is a multi-talented artist.  She taught me so many things, I couldn't possibly do them justice in this synopsis, but I remember she always encouraged me to be creative and to try anything. 

My father and uncle taught me how to program computers when I was about 10 years old.  We bought our first home computer at that time, a Tandy TRS-80.  I was thrilled with it and spent hours upon hours playing around with it.  Each computer we got had more capabilities and I was fast to exploit them and push them to the limits for the next few years.  In sixth grade, I joined the junior highschool band, and learned to play the drums.  I had loved the drums ever since I can remember, confiscating my sister's toy snare when I was 5 and playing it until the head broke.  I played drums all through junior high and high school and in those years really focused my creative energy on music and lost touch with computers a bit.   I was really into my friends in those days, too, and spent most of my free time with them. 

College

After graduating high school, I attened The University Of Texas here in Austin.  I started off as an Electrical Engineering major.  I was so into music and having new freedom away from home, that all I really wanted to do was play music and party.  That's pretty much what I did my freshman year, much to the detrement of my grades.  Truthfully, I wanted to drop out of school and be a rock star.  Instead, thanks largely to the influence of my father, I switched into the music school at UT as a percussion major for a year.   I learned a lot of great things about music theory in that year and did well in my classes. 

I decided after that year that I didn't want to learn all the rules of classical composition or play in a classical ensemble for 4 years, so I switched my major to undecided and took liberal arts classes.   I studied English and Russian, both of which I enjoyed.  I also studied Astronomy and Physics, which I loved.  I have an aptitude for math and sciences, which I developed from an early age, and I began thinking again that engineering was my calling afterall. 

After being undecided for a year, I switched back into Engineering, mechanical this time.  I took advanced calculus and physics which I really enjoyed, but I wasn't as into mechanical engineering as I thought I might be.  After a semester of that, I switched to Computer Science which was a natural fit, of course!  Don't ask me why I didn't just major in CS to begin with unless you have time for a long story.  Anyway, I did very well in all of my computer science classes, got a BS degree, and landed a job in Richardson, TX with Nortel Networks.  That was in 1994.

Software

I had a career in software development for 8 continuous years after graduating from college.  Check out my software resume for the gory details.  I made enough money to take several years off and pursue some other interests, mainly travel, but eventually music, always a passion.  

I took about a 6 year break from software starting in 2002 - I packed all of my computers away and didn't so much as read a line of code during that time.  I have since gotten back into it.  Not much has changed, but there are some interesting new developments.  Check out my Software Page for more about my current efforts.

Music

When I moved back to Austin in 2003, I predominantly played music and recorded music as an occupation.  I had the chance to play with some great musicians, go on the road, record several albums, and in general pursue a lifelong desire.  It was a great experience and a very important one for me.  I will always love making music and I still do it on a regular basis.  Check out my Music Page for more about that.

Present

I live on an old farm southeast of Austin near Bergstrom airport and McKinney Falls State Park.  Although it's further from the city than I was used to living, it's a very unique setting that I've learned to really appreciate.  I have a fully operational recording studio there and an office where I work on software projects.   My neighbors are all great people and we share a very nice little community between us.

I'm currently developing Ruby on Rails applications for my company, Capital Thought, and working on various music projects.