About
I hate creating about pages because I am really boring.
Personal Life
I live in Florida in The Villages. I was born in Hagerstown MD and grew up and graduated from Greencastle, PA, just over the PA / MD border. Most of my family lives in the Chambersburg / Greencastle area still.
About a year or so after I graduated high school in 1987 I moved to Texas for just over 5 years. I loved it down there. But because of job and some aging family members I moved back to the east coast.
When I moved back to the east coast I ended up living in Frederick County until I moved to Florida in 2022.
Professional Life
In the mid 80’s I started my IT career as a professional software developer when I was in 11th grade working for a company called “Telecommunication Products Corporation” or TPC. I do not think they are around anymore.
I was writing assembler and QuickBASIC at the time. Since then I have been in IT as my primary career. Up until the mid 90’s all I did was develop software using a number of languages. In the mid 90’s I started an ISP as the internet boom was starting. I started to get a ton of network experience at this point while still contracting out as a software developer at the same time. I sold that company in 2000 and went to work for PSINet where I got enterprise level network knowledge as well as network level security knowledge.
When PSINet went bankrupt I started working for Marriott International where I still am today. Inside of Marriott I started as a firewall engineer, then moved to network engineering, to operations starting the SNOC where I got entrenched in security (and still developing security tools). Now I am in Global Information Security as Sr. Director Security Architecture and Engineering where I have the priviledge of lead a great team of security architects and security eningeering teams that keep Marriott safe.
During my time at Marriott I started Genius Idea Studio to create some embedded systems projects for some friends. It has grown to much more than embedded systems. For a few years I was writing software for the Internet Marketing community before it got scammy. When I moved to Florida I closed down Genius Idea Studio.
I always have a project or two or three still in the works. I cannot get away from building and creating things.
Also, in the mid 90’s I started doing some live sound, lighting and video on a regular basis. This gave me a ton of experience in sound, lighting and video and to make friends with some real experts and to learn from them. From this experience I started getting requests for video production, etc. That is why Crazy Eye Studio was created. Mainly for marketing because it would seem funny for a software company to create videos, etc.
In 2012 we moved into a new home and in the basement I setup an almost 600 square foot office and 130 sq foot video/audio studio. In this studio we could record just about any kind of audio. If you watch any of the shows at Tech-zen.tv you can see the studio we call Studio A. The office is big enough that I can carve parts of it for other sets too. The sets are all very portable and can be changed in minutes if needed.
The funny thing is I consider myself an introvert. I have never minded speaking in front of people but you would think an introvert would stay as far away from a mic and camera as possible.
After trying a few different video setups, I ended up with a hybrid video system that uses an ATEM to switch but the graphic capabilities on the ATEM leave much room for improvement so I added another layer, Wirecast. But then ran into the problem of controlling both. So back to the embedded systems, I started to design a control surface that could control both the ATEM and Wirecast simultaneously.
That got me back into prototyping which means I now also do 3D printing, Laser Cutting, CNC milling and much more. It is a very fun and creative past time.
I am also an active Ham Radio enthusiast. When I lived in Maryland I was very active in the local community. I am still active, just the community here in Florida is different.
I recently have been spending a lot of time on new radio tech like Meshtastic and some Meshcore recently as well.
Most recently I have gotten into all different aspects of AI. Developing projects with AI, creating AI agents, doing AI workflows with things like n8n, setting up AI bots like OpenClaw and so much more.
I have published just a few books now, all of them fiction (including 2 childrens books). I have 2 more fiction books I want to create that have a unique style to them and I have some non fiction books in the works as well. The fiction books are much easier. You can checkout the books on the About -> Books on this website.
I think above pretty much describes my hobbies too :) I am always learning something new and like to make things as I learn, that is why Tech-zen.tv exists.
