About Me

So here’s a bit about me, personally.

These days I live in Delaware County (aka, just east of Middle of Nowhere) New York, get­ting here by way of New York City, Connecticut, Cincinnati, Columbus, Roanoke, Richmond, and oth­er places.

The professional stuff

I’m a vet­er­an (20+ years) com­mu­ni­ca­tions guy who’s worked for mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, and Web sites includ­ing PC Magazine, USA Today, National Underwriter, CNET, the Roanoke (Va.) Times and Blue Ridge Business Journal.

My work’s appeared in those pubs, plus the Columbus Dispatch, Kiplinger’s, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Smart Money mag­a­zine, to name a few.

I’ve also been a mag­a­zine edi­tor, have launched three pub­li­ca­tions, cre­at­ed too many Web sites to name, done mar­ket­ing and PR work, and am in the process of rais­ing my karmic come­up­pance in the form of an 18-year-old son.

So yeah, I keep busy.

The personal stuff

I love sci­ence and his­to­ry, and I spend way too much time teach­ing myself about all sorts of odd sub­jects. These mini-obses­sions last a week or two: geo­caching, hik­ing, wood­work­ing, pro­gram­ming, pad­dle­ball, rac­quet­ball, cook­ing, and more. Some I stick with longer than oth­ers, but I get some­thing out of them all.

I’m an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­ph­er and I love image and video edit­ing. I enjoy think­ing about the pre­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion — what’s the best way to tell some­one what they need to know?

My degree’s in phi­los­o­phy. It’s been more use­ful than you might think.

I read lots of non-fic­tion — his­to­ry and sci­ence for the most part, but any­thing, real­ly. And I read a ton of fic­tion — sci-fi, mys­tery, hor­ror, or just plain lit.

Here, have some con­ver­sa­tion starters…

Hobbies

Media

Books

I’m a suck­er for a good read with a hap­py end­ing. So any­thing by…

In gen­er­al…

And…

Movies

Argh… so many! In no par­tic­u­lar order:

Music

I like all sorts of music, but I’m not a huge music per­son. I avoid rap, and I like stuff from the ’30s and ’40s along with some good ’70s rock. But real­ly, any­thing that isn’t AutoTuned to death.

(What, you want specifics? All righty… Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, ELO, Arctic Monkeys, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Ramones, Creedence, AC/DC, Alan Parsons Project… ugh, the list goes on. The Who, Hayley Westenra, Proclaimers, the Beatles … sheesh, it’s still going. Hooters,Tom Petty, Elton John … and that’s enough, right?)

The miscellaneous stuff

I’m a ground­ed geek — I love tech­nol­o­gy, but it has to be use­ful. So I play a lot with Web sites, build­ing things just for the heck of it: mes­sage boards, wikis, pho­to albums, polls, and so on, just to see if I can make them crazy easy to use. (For no oth­er rea­son, I built my own bit.ly-style URL short­en­er at fllw.me, and cre­at­ed a cus­tomized Web-based mail sys­tem just for myself.)

I find cool­ness in the mundane.

I’m the guy in the office who every­one comes to if they need com­put­er trou­bleshoot­ing, want to buy a dig­i­tal cam­era, feel like start­ing a blog, and so on.

And I do most of my writ­ing with a foun­tain pen or a pencil.

Cool stuff I’ve done

And that’s me. Well, bare­ly. It’s a vague out­line any­way. If you came here won­der­ing “Who is this guy,” maybe you have at least a few answers.

Want more? Drop me a line!