Short version. You'll have to read the entire site to get the long version. Mostly.

I was born in Tampa, Florida and but for a year in Denver (April 1992 - April 1993) and a season in Vero Beach (1994) it has been my home. My school age years were spent in the East Bay area (southern Hillsborough County—Gibsonton and points south). Before Denver it was Hyde Park; after Ybor. The natural migration for a Gen Xer back then was to Seminole Heights. I now live on the periphery of the historic district in a 1926 bungalow with a never ending list of repairs and projects. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Professionally I am web developer[sic], though I have a dream of being a small scale commercial fisherman doing local, sustainable boat to table seafood. Maybe even a fish shack doing smoked mullet and fish sandwiches. Which stems from my time working in indie restaurants. Busboy to server in my Hyde Park days. Starting in Denver, I moved to the kitchen where I stayed until going back to community college in my early 30s. Burned out but needing money while I started taking classes, I did a stint waiting tables at the Spaghetti Factory in Ybor. A master class in the turn and burn school of restaurants. I cobbled together a website for a restaurant I was the chef for circa 1999 and had a friend who moved to NY who sent me bootleg Photoshop discs for my iMac. I honed my skills making making message board sigs until I took a class on it in school. Another friend had a blog and I wanted in. Enter WordPress. Meanwhile, in school the classes available were teaching how to use Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver to build sites. Before I knew it I was getting paid to fix and build sites. That didn’t always pay the bills and sometimes I’d miss the kitchen. Working part time at the convention center, catering, stumbling into chef gigs. Meanwhile I was working remotely or freelancing on web stuff and deep into open source. Prior to the pandemic I took a developer role with a local marketing agency that was an absolutely eye opening experience. That doesn’t even cover half of it.

The one constant has been my struggle with my mental health. I was diagnosed with a Generalized Anxiety Disorder in 2000. I briefly attempted to try medication but I had a bad reaction to what was prescribed and lost insurance changing jobs. So it went unchecked until 2015. There’s a lot more to say about that than can fit in this supposedly short version of a bio.

Really, this web log is meant to be my autobiography.