About Me and Hobbies

One of my more recent large projects has been to build a guitar. Thankfully, I was able to work with some amazing, skilled, and flexible luthiers over the course of 2 years to put together this custom beauty from start to finish. I had little prior woodworking experience but this was not a "kit" build. The instructors had their students do all of their own work using raw planks of wood, pearl, and cow bone (which smells awful when sanded).

After that project I spent a lot of time upgrading the networking in my first house and making custom retro game system builds on the raspberry pi.

I volunteered with FIRST Robotics for 4 years at the Hopkins "Tech Vikes" robotics club. I worked with the students to mentor them on a wide range of topics including Solidworks design, computer building, graphic design, and video editing highlighted in their awesome robot reveal video to the right.

I enjoy the process of teaching friends and family how to build and maintain their own computers. I do anywhere between 1 and 2 custom builds a year on average from low budget to high end. I also do consulting on network setups and data recovery. My setup includes a liquid cooled overclocked i7-10700K and my custom home server to backup and host games.

I'll play video games in my free time but as I get older I find that board games over beers with friends are my preference. In no particular order, some games include the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill, the card game Exploding Kittens, Real Time Strategies such as Supreme Commander, Exploring the universe in the No Man's Sky video game, and of course you can join me in a heavily modded Minecraft server.

Audiobooks have been my go-to source for book consumption. I highly recommend The Bobiverse on Audible to any science fiction fans (review to the right). Otherwise, I am a fan of The Lord of the Rings and its extended history as well as His Dark Materials.

I appreciate deep discussions about purpose and debates about nearly anything. If you have not yet read the short story, "The Egg" by Andy Weir, I highly recommend you drop what you're doing and spend a moment to watch the short video on the right. I'm always interested in boiling down a debate to its roots and finding out the core difference in belief. Typically disagreement stems from lack of reliable data but diving down to that point brings people closer by understanding each other and their perspectives.