I was born and raised in Lansing

Hobbies:
  * Electronics:
    * When I was really young, I started taking apart all my toys so I could see how they worked, many of them didn't make it back together, because the real toys were inside.
    * In high school I was involved in building an electric car from scratch (Electrathon). I was also in Science Olympia my favorite event was a big Rube Goldberg device.
    * I took 2 years of basic electronics, while I do enjoy electronics, I found it was not the career field for me.
  * Programming:
    * I've spent many years just toying around with computers, some of my first memories programming were at 6 or 7 years old copying down basic code out of the back of my IBM pc/jr, Commodore 64, and TI 99 manuals. I taught myself Turbo Pascal when I was in 7th grade. In high school I took an independent study to further my Pascal skills instead of taking a required intro computer course.
    * I went to Michigan State University for a couple years, studying computer science. During my time at MSU, I was working for the Division of Engineering Computing Services. I stayed working for DECS as a full time web developer until March of 2005. I learned quite a few skills over the years in that field and I’d consider myself very knowledgeable in php, MySQL, PostgreSQL, HTML, css, Photoshop, JavaScript, as well as many other web related technologies. 
    * I've worked as a web developer at the Michigan State Supreme Court since.  Skills I use there are C#, Visual Basic .NET, Oracle, SQL Server, and many many more.
  * Home automation:
    * I have integrated over 30 lights, 9 temperature sensors (1 of which I installed in my hot tub), 9 motions sensors, 3 door and window sensors as well as other numerous things into my home automation system.
    * I've been involved in some sort of home automation since I was very young using pulleys and string attached to my light switch.
  * Photography:
    * I’ve always been interested, but I never really got into it until July 2005. I finally broke down and bought a DSLR camera. I got a Nikon D70s and a pair of beginner lenses. Still just a hobby though.

  * Notable Projects:
    * I built an MP3 computer for my car back in 1998 before they had portable MP3 players.  This basically was a computer built under some trunk space in the car, so I could play music from it instead of having to change CD’s. I fabricated a custom plexyglass case sized to fit, and I had custom fit a ZIP drive into the dash board where I could insert a new zip disk and the files would transfer off to the hard drive of the PC automatically.  This was long before USB flash drives.
    * In 2000 I built a web camera robot that you could drive around my old apartment from a webpage, using quite a few things that were never intended to be used together. I used a hardware parallel relay controller that I built probably 6 years before, to control this robot wirelessly.
    * Many, many home improvement projects
      * deck
      * framing
      * plumbing
      * electrical
      * drywall
      * home theater with 97" screen and rumble chair.
      * basement bar
        * kegerator (2 beers on tap)
    * HTPC
    * MAME
    * 3D Printing (Solidoodle 2)
    * CNC router