Life Story

I have a mom and a dad and two sisters. I was born a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. When I was young, I used to live in St. Paul, Minnesota. I played in a sandbox and watched Sesame Street, then later He-Man and Transformers. Then our family moved and I went to school in a town called Hugo, Minnesota. We had a big yard. I got to ride the lawn mower, run around, and shoot hoops. We had a pond, I would skate in the winter with my neighborhood friends. After years of reading, writing, and arithmetic, all the while playing football, kickball, four square, baseball, basketball, and tag, I left Hugo Elementry School and went to Central Junior High in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. We had a pool then. I would swim and splash around most of the summer.

After Junior High, it was on to White Bear Lake Area High School. I went to North Campus first. It was round. At that time I quit playing sports, began hacking on computers and programming. I gained an appreciation for music and got my first guitar. I was stuck in advanced and AP classes and didn't really know too many people in high school. I met a lot more of them after I graduated.

I rotted in high school for a few years. I began my junior year and moved to South Campus. I worked at Cub Foods in White Bear Township (a grocery store). I started bagging groceries, moved to cashier, then was a Customer Service Manager. Then in my senior year I was in Yearbook under the advisement of Mr. Daniel J. Anthony Wagner. That opportunity changed my life, and my waist forever. I gained at least 20 lbs. in direct result of Yearbook and taking all the advantages that came with it. I got to skip school to go eat, sleep and be merry, sometimes on the school's expense.

Senior year was pretty cool. I hosted the homecoming talent show at which I made my first public performance playing a couple of songs on the guitar with Sam Steiner. We played under the bill Sam and the Gyrations. First we did a slow blues number, then we tore it up with a rousing rendition of "I'll Be There for You" (a very overplayed and hated song at the time) with Mike Harris singing/screaming while dressed in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume. After Yearbook and a good nap I was done with high school. I graduated from White Bear Lake Area High School in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.

After high school I found myself traveling north, Duluth, Minnesota. It's often very cold. There's a big Lake, trees, seagulls when it's not frozen, it's a pretty cool place. I was admitted to the University of Minnesota Duluth to pursue my BS in Computer Science. I lived in Griggs Hall my first year, Oakland Apartmens the second, and then Stadium Apartments my final two years. Every year I played intermural volleyball. I also participated in basketball, softball and hockey. I met a lot of good friends in Duluth.

In the summers of 1997, 1998, and 1999 I had the privledged opportunity to intern with the City of Saint Paul. I was part of the team we called Webservices. It was just three of us. Dennis Grittner (now retired), Roger Grupp (now retired), and myself. There I basically maintained and configured servers and developed scripts and static html pages my freshman summer. When I came back into town, there was a new guy Pete Nelson . He went to school in Duluth for while too. As a four person team we worked very well. We did so much more my sophomore summer. We installed new multihomed servers with complex and secure configurations. We moved over 6000 individual pages of content to the new servers. I wrote a lot more scripts, played quite a bit with a sql server, recompiled a few kernels, and had the priveledge of using an SGI Indy for my workstation. I learned a lot and had even more fun.

While at school, I have worked at the Center for Professional Development, part of the University College, on the campus of UMD. I loved the people, the job, and the work. I did mostly web development. The CPD was into promoting, supporting, and developing course material for the TopClass Course Management system. It was a new way to deliver and manage course content over the web. My former co-worker James Howard and I have developed our own third party software for developing tests for TopClass. We called it TestMaker (which is now dead and burried). Since James moved on to work for Minnesota Power, and now Siemens, I also worked there with John Madden. John and I along with four other goofballs bought UMD season hockey tickets together for our final year as students at UMD. We drank beer and cheered (in that order).

I graduated in May 2000. I took a job doing real work for a software company developing and testing Network Security Products. There I played with lots of computers in a big lab. I mostly wrote programs to test other programs. In the mean time I gained a lot of experience in all sorts of network configuration and security.

Then in May of 2002 I was accepted to the U of M IT graduate school. I enrolled in the Continuing Development of Technological Leadership program for the Masters of Science in Software Engineering. It's a mouthful, but it was lots of fun. It is a gradutate program for continuing professionals with a keen sense for the business of getting software done on time, on budget and with high quality. This is supposed to make me a better person too, although it demanded nearly all of my free time away from work.

In the winter of '03 I accepted a new position at a new employer. I began working for Shavlik Technologies as a Software Engineer. I was given the opporunity to design and implement a new product from the ground floor. This was a rewarding experience. We completed the project with a staff of only two engineers. I started in Janurary, had a prototype in late Feburuary and a final full product was released at the end of June. I really enjoyed this experience it gave me the opportunity to actually practice all the fancy new things I learned in grad school.

As part of my capstone project to complete my Master's program, I worked on a software project supporting an old friend, Chris McIntosh. Mac is a PhD canidate in economics at the University of Wyoming. He's also an old friend from both high school and college. He is doing some interesting work in the field of game theory and its economic applications. One particular research project he was working on required analysis of empricial data. This kind of research required that surveys are given and results of those surveys would then be compiled and analyized. Well, in order to do good research you must have a broad sample. To do a large sample, this process is very lengthy, tedious, error prone. They initially solicited some advice on how to use existing software tools to automate their process. I then assisted research team to design and implement some custom software tools to execute their research. I was able to contribute tools that automated much of the analysis and significantly increased the breadth and scope of their research.

From my part in this research I composed a paper titled "Distance Collaboration and the Design and Development of an Experimental Economics Software Package". Then I presented the project before an examination board, and passed, thus receiving my Master's Degree in the spring of 2004. Mr. McIntosh and his advisor Dr. Shogren have also given me co-authorship on the paper that they developed from this research. This paper has been submitted for publication and may be published in the near future.

A few years later I was promoted at Shavlik. I earned the title Senior Software Engineer. I began leading the Database / Data Tools team. As a team we contribute components to all of Shavlik's products in the area of data access. It's been a challenge, but I believe I'm up to it.

In the fall of 2005, I proposed to my then girlfriend Amber. I bought a house on the north side of White Bear Lake, MN. We got married on October 7th, 2006 in Mankato, MN. Life has been a blur. We've been very busy working to make the house our own, painting, cleaning, and I re-did the basement bathroom.

Shortly after our wedding we received some great news. We were already beginning our family. Pregnancy was fun, let's leave it at that. On August 12th, 2007 we welcomed our son, Everett Jay into the world. He was born at home. We chose to have a home birth with our midwives at our side. He came into the world weighing 8lbs and 5oz, and 21 1/4 inches long. He's definitely the center of our lives now and we look forward to all the joy in being parents and sharing in his experiences as he learns so much about the world we live in.

Any further developments such as death will be posted here at the time of such an event.