91¿´Æ¬Íø

About Me

I'm a family man. My wife Jill (M.A.Ed '97) is a Reading Interventionist for a local public elementary school, and my daughter Courtney is working as an aid for a public school Kindergarten a few hours north. They keep my life interesting—and help me keep a balance between work and home.

I'm also an unapologetic science, technology, and A/V geek!

I cut my teeth on a while in elementary school—good off-season practice for wiring up Dad's pre-war set under the Christmas tree.

My computer experience moved from a — with the 16KB expansion cartridge! — and in junior high, through a few years with  and dumb terminals on a  in college. It was during my 3 years working for the Instructional Technology Lab in Swem Library that I was first introduced to the computer.

After some years managing a  network of Windows 95/98 PCs and picking up languages from Pascal to Visual Basic, I have found a niche vacillating between and computers, having the occasional dalliance with the , and hacking a bit of alphabet-soup web code (CFML, CSS, HTML, JS, SQL, PHP, VTL, XSLT).

In addition to computers, I've dabbled in a variety of audio/visual technologies—photography using to synchronize multiple slide projectors with an audio track, videography using a live switcher with multiple cameras and post-production A-B roll edits, and stage lighting using and other cool gear. Of all the A/V tech I've tried, I've always come back to audio.

I've been hooked on music (of various genres) since the 1970s, and a diversity of podcasts since 2005. I also share with my daughter an affinity for audio books (aka books on tape). But is my love and avocation. I've had the opportunity, over the years, to provide this service to dozens of community and theatrical events, and thousands of church services.

Education

I'm a local boy. After graduating in 1987, I followed my father's legacy by earning a degree from 91¿´Æ¬Íø with a concentration in Physics and minor in Mathematics (B.S. 1991).

I delayed my entry into the real world by signing on as a technical intern for the Virginia Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 1991—bringing my total credit-hours in Theatre, Speech, and Dance (now called Theatre and Performance) to twenty-one. (To be clear, that's eighteen in Theatre, three in Speech, and zero in Dance.)

After a winter away from the 'burg, I returned to my Alma Mater for a , concentrating in K-12 Administration and Supervision (M.Ed. 1994).

In the subsequent years I have completed one master's-level and two doctoral-level courses in education; received training from , , and the ; and completed the certification. I continue to attend local, national and online conferences — having often presented as well.

Professional Experience

During my 7 year hiatus from 91¿´Æ¬Íø, I served as a high school science teacher (3 years), technical director of the theater (5 years), and computer-coordinator/Director of Technology (7 years) for a . In addition to teaching duties, I was responsible for set design and construction, as well as sound and lighting design and production for 3 main-stage productions and various grade-level and community events (symphony orchestras, beauty pageants, and body builders) taking place in the auditorium each year. I also had responsibility for the bell, phone, computer and networking systems at the school. At the time I left, in 2001, I was managing 2 Windows 2000 and 5 Novell Netware servers, over 100 networked computers (100Mbps to the desktop), and a fiber-optic backbone providing 1Gbps between the two main buildings, 100Mbps to several remote buildings and a T1 (1.544Mbps synchronous) internet connection.

In the 20+ years since I returned to the university as an employee in the summer of 2001, my responsibilities have shifted and developed. Over this time I have taught staff how to write web code, built a tool kit that obviated the need for staff to write web code, and developed multiple bespoke web applications. My job title, Senior Web Architect, is a bit of a catch-all encompassing facilitator of the University Web & Design team (and IT liaison) for specifying the university's public web infrastructure; application architect and system analyst helping to develop functional specifications for various web applications; co-maintainer for miscellaneous existing web applications; and programmer, doing a bit of actual coding.

Projects and Roles

I currently serve as system administrator for the university's primary content management system, . I also serve as one of the email support specialist for University Web & Design, responding to questions on Cascade and other web technologies that we manage. Until recently, I was the lead trainer for Cascade CMS—assisting faculty, staff and student-intern web editors in getting up to speed via both in-person and online training.

I have served on several campus and IT committees—from the RFP committee for re.web, to several personnel search committees—and for several years I facilitated the Web Operations Team within Information Technology.

Among projects that are still in operation, I helped produce the . Projects for which I have served as technical lead include:

• AlcoholEdu single sign-on
• Course Evaluation System
• Digital Information Literacy (DIL) Evaluation
• Education Policy Committee GER management system
• iTunesU at W&M and iTunesU single sign-on
• President's Collection of Student and Faculty Art web site
• Protocol and Compliance Management System
• re.Web (co-technical lead)
• Student Happenings email newsletter
• Tribe Responses (co-technical lead)
• Tribe Voices (co-technical lead)
• W&M Web Templates
• Web front-end for W&M Digest, GreekDigest and LawSchoolCommunity listservs

Personal Interests

Many weekends you'll find me mixing sound for . Podcasts keep me at the top of my game as I commute from listening to , , , or .

I further exercise the reading an occasional physics book—most recently by my freshman physics professor, Hans Christian von Baeyer, PhD. (To re-appropriate a characterization of Wolfgang Pauli, Dr. von Baeyer is "a natural philosopher in the classical sense of the phrase." If you haven't read any of his books, I recommend them!)

If I make it outdoors during the warm season, my favorite activity is canoeing at —an activity to which I introduced my daughter a few summers ago.