Portland, Oregon
A life around family, story, music, machines, camp, travel, and the long habit of figuring things out.
Some people are easy to summarize by a job title. I am not. I have moved through technology, performance, camp life, fatherhood, road work, music, machines, Native community, and outdoor places. The pieces are not separate to me. They are all part of how I pay attention.
About this site: I built this with ChatGPT as an active exploration of how AI works as a creative and technical collaborator: useful, strange, sometimes wrong, and only as good as the human steering it.
AI build note
I used ChatGPT to help shape, write, revise, and build this site. Not because I think the machine knows who I am better than I do, but because I wanted to explore how it works when pushed, corrected, argued with, and used as a tool instead of a magic answer box.
This site was built through an iterative back-and-forth with ChatGPT. I supplied the context, photos, corrections, boundaries, and direction; the AI helped draft, organize, revise, and assemble the site. What you see here is not an outside authority’s version of me. It is a working portrait shaped from the material I provided, with all the limits, gaps, edits, and course corrections that come with that process.
The site was written through a back-and-forth iterative process: I pushed, corrected, rejected placeholder language, supplied photos and context, and used the machine as a drafting and building tool. The site is about me, and the limited context and the making of it is also part of the story.
Life
I have moved through a lot of circles: family, camp, music, theater, Native community, small towns, road trips, shops, stages, beaches, forests, and late-night conversations around fires.
I am of Native American and settler ancestry, and I was raised in Lakota traditions and community. That does not need to sit off to the side as a separate label. It is part of how I understand story, humor, responsibility, memory, and the way people carry one another.
That is why WOTE matters to me. Not because it is an “archive project” in the abstract, but because those recordings, stories, and media belong to real people, families, and community memory.
The pattern in my life has usually been simple: see the thing that needs doing, care enough to learn what it takes, and stay with it until it works.
Making, machines & motion
I like things that ask for attention: a printer that needs tuning, a motorcycle that needs listening to, a car that rewards smooth inputs, a trail that changes with weather, a fish that took patience, a van that slowly becomes more useful because you keep solving the next problem.
3D printing, a 3018 CNC router, motorcycles, sports cars, flying, fishing, camping, hunting, hiking, mountain climbing, and an overlanding van build all sit in the same general neighborhood for me. They keep me learning, adjusting, and paying attention.
Music, performance & production
I played bass in Sacred Dream, an all-Native heavy metal band, and spent years around rock shows, touring work, camp stages, circus arts, theater, and performance. I also road-managed for John Trudell and Bad Dog and worked behind the scenes on shows connected to Native storytelling and performance.
Live production taught me patience and nerve. Sound, lighting, projection, rigging, timing, performers, audiences, and weather all have opinions. Something always changes. You learn to listen, adjust, and keep the room alive.
That experience still shapes how I think. Whether it is a bass, a mixer, a light board, a server, a printer, or a vehicle, I want to understand the whole system, not just my little corner of it.
Professional story
My professional path grew out of the same habits that show up elsewhere in my life: pay attention, understand the system, and make it work without pretending the people using it are separate from the problem. I have worked across rural business IT, ISP services, web hosting, enterprise support, camp operations, project coordination, live production technology, WOTE-related media systems, and creative technical projects.
Systems administration, physical and virtual servers, Mac, Windows, Linux, Microsoft environments, networking, wireless, telephony, printers, cameras, A/V, security systems, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and virtualization including ESXi, Xen, Hyper-V, Parallels, and Citrix.
My work has ranged from one-person rural operations to large industrial environments. Fearless Computer Solutions served businesses too small for in-house IT. Sims Metal Management brought large-company systems, support, compliance, and infrastructure scale.
Drupal, PHP, WordPress, Joomla, HTML, CSS, hosting, email, DNS, CMS work, Adobe tools, and early web development history. MyCommunityMatters.net provided dial-up, DSL, web hosting, and email to around 100 customers.
At Camp Winnarainbow, I helped run the full cycle of a sleepaway circus and performing arts camp: registration, seasonal setup and teardown, systems improvement, scholarship support, fundraising, events, staff support, and logistics.
One-person rural IT consulting operation serving small businesses, farms, sole proprietors, and organizations without in-house IT.
ISP and internet services provider offering dial-up, DSL, hosting, and email, with early VISP.net ISP-in-a-box beta experience.
Technology consulting, project management, Drupal/web work, hosting, server support, and client systems work.
Enterprise IT support across western locations, systems administration, ticketing systems, Linux/SAI support, compliance projects, and infrastructure support.
Operations management, registration systems, technology modernization, seasonal infrastructure, fundraising, safety, and event operations.
Tier 2 support, project coordination, escalation, implementation QA, technical validation, documentation, and cross-functional support.
Creative technical project umbrella for WOTE-related media systems work, CNC and machine experiments, performance technology, and other practical projects.
A few pictures from the pile
Contact
No form, no funnel. Email, call, or connect on LinkedIn.