I love all things creative, and especially learning new things. 

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I've called Tampa Bay home for my whole life;  I've visited plenty of other places, but always look forward to coming back here.   It's a beautiful place of sunsets and thunderstorms, burgeoning with change as far back as I can remember, populated by a satisfying mixture of all kinds of different people living next door to each other, but not so crowded that one gets overwhelmed walking downtown.  I've brought my two kids up here.

 

I never went to college, but I love to learn, and I've taught myself a ton of stuff, and learned whenever I can from many great mentors I've had in my life. 

 

I've been writing computer programs since I was 13 years old, doing it professionally for 20 years.  Most people don't tend to think of software development as art, but it's at least as creative as writing a song or a story, where there are goals and structures that must be met while the path to reach them is a blank you can fill in a million different ways.  But this page is not about software development.

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I've played some great roles.

 

Most recently I got to be scapegoat John Lerro in local playwright Bill DeYoung's full-length one-man play, Mayday: Captain Lerro and the Skyway Bridge.  It was a hell of a lot of work, and I didn't know if I was even capable of memorizing over an hour of monologue, but the show was very successful, I'm forever grateful for that experience.

 

Some of my other favorites include John Oldman in Jerome Bixby's sci-fi classic The Man from Earth, genius mathematician Alan Turing in Hugh Whitemore's non-fiction Breaking the Code, Evilix in the musical Star Trek parody Star Chix, and Henry Baskerville in the on-stage radio show adaption of Hounds of the Baskervilles.   I also got to operate the man-eating plant  puppets in Little Shop of Horrors.

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I've made some awesome artwork.

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I'm currently working on an installation for The Penninsularium in Tampa called Photonic Vibrations, it's a 40 foot storage container filled with rings of color-changing LEDs and thousands of sensors that detect the movements of human beings, interactively animating the rings as they pass or gesture toward the walls.

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I also enjoy "painting" with chalk pastels, throwing pottery on the wheel, carving, sculpting, and especially adding movement or effects to pieces of artwork.

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I mostly enjoy working with the surreal, or obviously unusual, but every so often I just want to share a moment of beauty through my own lens.

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I've built some cool stuff for the stage.

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6 foot tall picture books, 3D relief palm trees, an 8 foot animated starship engine, a flip-clock naughty list counter, a haircutting machine that pours smoke when it goes out-of-control, an articulated horse puppet operated from inside and by a rider outside, a magical trident that goes from gold to colorful flame...  Check out my props/effects section to see many of my creations.

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I love sculpting styrofoam!   I enjoy painting large-scale set backdrops.  I love working with LED stage lighting and scrims (walls that disappear when you change the lighting), and have built a few custom rigs that are controlled by DMX chained right in with the rest of the stage lights.  But my favorite thing is to build dynamic stuff that changes or reacts to people on stage.

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Words are the streams that run through my mind.

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Some people mostly think visually, some mostly through sound, others mostly be feeling their body doing things.  For me, it's words that form the foundation of everything.

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I've loved writing since I was in Kindergarten. 

 

I have a terrible habit of long-windedness.  I wrote a lot of poetry in High School, lost an entire notebook of it at the hospital once visiting my uncle.  I still occasionally write a poem when I'm struck by the right emotion, but these days it's mostly prose.

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I co-wrote episodes of a Quarantine Web Series called "In the Meantime" with Katie Calahan, I'm working on a number of plays, one of which I am currently workshopping with Project Greenlight at Lab Theater Project, called "Hippie House".  It's about a Jinni who falls in love with the tragic soul who found it, and the retirement home hippies that travel back in time with the Jinni to right that tragedy.

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I'm also working on telling the most interesting true stories from my life, here on this website in the section titled "My Life", for those who really want to know.

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Electrons usually do what you tell them to.

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My Dad taught me to solder when I was probably about 10.  He worked in a TV repair shop, back when that was a way to make a living.  There are a lot of things I learned and forgot about electronics, but in the last several years I've re-learned a ton about electronic engineering, particularly as Arduino came on the scene making it easy to control circuits using software.

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At this point I'm a master of all the basics, I'm comfortable with transistors and relays, all types of animated RGB LEDs, many different types of sensors, working with different voltage levels in the same circuit, dissecting schematics and hacking commercial products to control them externally.

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In the Electronics section I will post details of weird things I've made or hacked that would be most interesting to folks who have some knowledge of electronics.

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