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Below is a list of experiences, endeavors and achievements pertaining to my professional, creative and personal interests.

Feel free to send me an email or find me online. My resume and references are available upon request.

Some things I've done:

Eighty-six plant-based and vegetarian pizzas baked from scratch

We invested in an electric pizza oven that can heat up to 750 degrees, able to cook a pizza in two minutes.
After about a year, I had baked eighty-six plant-based and vegetarian pizzas.

Salesforce Certifications

As of 2022, I have the following Salesforce Certifications, and have been completing the maintenance exams each respective season:

Food Bank consulting

For a number of years, I've been consulting for a major food bank with about 200,000 constituents.
My role has primarily been helping with their Blackbaud Luminate CRM, email development and Wordpress development.
It's only a small number of hours per month, but I find it very rewarding as I also get to see the positive impact of their campaigns.
Coincidentally, my older brother lives in a town thousands of miles away that's sometimes featured in the food bank's campaigns.

Impulsebuddy music tracker tools

For over a decade, I had primary used a Microsoft DOS-based application for making music called Impulse Tracker.
When the time came to move on to a more modern application, to make the new application more familiar and able to mesh with my existing muscle memory from the old software, I developed a set of tools that enabled a set of shortcuts and features from the old software into the new software.
The tools were developed using the Lua programming language and the Renoise API.
I also designed a custom set of Impulse Tracker TrueType fonts and a method to install them into Renoise.

International travel

Less for leisure, and more for creative opportunities, I've been to the following places outside of the United States:
- Antwerp, Bangkok, Belize (inland), Bern, Chang Mai, Chiang Rai, Cologne, Córdoba, Dublin, Essaouira, Krabi, Krong Siem Reap, Leipzig, London, Lüneburg, Marrakesh, Melbourne, Milan, Monza, Rotterdam, Saint-Bernard, San Ignacio, San José, Seville, Vancouver
- Many of the places were visited in a 1989 Ford Transit with an extended roof and a stick-shift. With only four-cylinders, it was difficult to get up hills on the autobahn.

Wiki

Along with convincing everyone on my team to use a proper password manager, I migrated our old documentation into a new wiki.

Before then, documentation was simply floating around in Google Docs
Now it's something fun to contribute to and share
It makes it 1,000% easier to on-board new employees.

Drupal training

To properly hand-off Drupal sites I've developed for various clients and partners, I've led training sessions on the various content management processes and procedures.
Since each team generally has some turnover every year or so, each year I lead a refresher training session.
Users with different roles are also considered in the training, such as superusers vs content editor users.

donmartinipsum.joe.zone

Don Martin is a cartoonist for the humor magazine, Mad (magazine).
They are well known for creating a seemingly infinite number of peculiar onomatopoeias, which almost read as a new form of language.
This inspired me to create donmartinipsum.joe.zone, a site that generates random snippets of "lorem ipsum" in various styles and formats that may be copied and pasted into projects.

Open Graph Protocol

Remotely over Zoom and with a prepared Adobe Animate puppet, I gave a presentation on the purpose and value of the Open Graph protocol.

It was often overlooked as a mandatory for projects, so I wanted to present something memorable
The audience consisted of about two hundred attendees

Use a password manager, please.

I convinced everyone on my team to start properly using a password manager.

I noticed sensitive information was often shared in the internal wiki, and we had to stop doing that.
At another employer, if you printed something out from the wiki and left it out in the open, "you had to eat it".

Vegan ghost pepper curry ice cream

I, for one, enjoyed it:

1 can coconut milk (cream)
1c plant-based milk
1 avocado
Sweeten with sugar or syrup of your choice
1/4tsp xanthan gum
Blend and churn in your preferred churner

Alumni Weekend Drupal website

I inherited the university's existing Drupal website that's the main driver for their yearly Alumni Weekend event.
Working with a UX consultant, we revamped the site's structure and layout.
Working with the design team's mockup, I built a new Drupal theme.
I also developed a new system with Drupal views to create, categorize and search all of the events and sessions each year.
Over the years, the site was reused. Occasional theme upgrades were applied, and the site was migrated from D7 > D8, and now runs on D10.

University magazine website Drupal migration and rebuild

The university magazine's website was in great need of a theme upgrade to something mobile-first.
Initially on Drupal 6, I migrated the site to Drupal 8 and implemented the Acquia Lightning distribution so the owners of the magazine could take advantage of its publishing workflow.
As we upgraded to D9 and D10, we realized Lightning's features were not really being used, so I decided to remove Lightning from the site. Lightning was also due to be retired from Acquia's support.
Removing Lightning was easier said than done, but I did it!

Higher-Ed Summit roundtable host at Drupalcon Nashville

At a Drupal conference hosted in Nashville, TN, I hosted a roundtable discussion as part of the conference's Higher-Ed Summit.
The topic I presented was about concept for building a website for a yearly event where the site has distinct phases with major content updates.
The goal was to build a site that would make it easy to prepare all of the phase content weeks or months in advance, and the site could simply be toggled between the different phases, rather than having to manually change the content of each page when the time came.

UC San Diego Interaction Design Specialization series for Human-computer Interaction (HCI)

I completed this series of courses, excluding the final capstone.
Courses included: Human-Centered Design, Design Principles, Social Computing, Input and Interaction, User Experience: Research & Prototyping, Information Design, Designing, Running, and Analyzing Experiments

"Look Who's Coming" Cvent API plugin

I developed a method to display attendee information from a Cvent registration form on any website.
Registrants may opt-in to have their name displayed on a list for a specific event or session within the event.
The "Look Who's Coming" list is automatically updated as registrants visit the website hosting the list.
The list reports the total number of attendees and then the names of those who have opted-in, as well as the guest names they had entered.
The reusable script uses AngularJS and the Cvent SOAP API.

Hydro Inc. multisite migration and rebuild

A Chicago based engineering company with a long and interesting history needed help consolidating their online presence.
Initially they had about a dozen separate Drupal websites, one for each location, and it was difficult to make global changes to any branding or content.
Working with their small in-house marketing team, I helped migrate them from multiple separate Drupal sites, into one Drupal multisite, which was later again migrated into a Wordpress multisite.
This involved creating new Drupal and Wordpress themes based on input from their marketing and design team, and determining the most efficient way to migrate the content of each site into the new platform.

Alumni Weekend selfie generator

To help promote the yearly event, I developed a fun, web-based, selfie-generator.
The resulting image was an overlay of the iconic park fence at the university square along with the university and event branding.
After generating the image, links are presented to the user to automatically share the image to social networks along with a link to the event website or registration page.

Glitch art featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA)

A piece of digital "glitch" art I created was included in a gallery series and auditorium event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The piece was titled "a chicago bear", which was a manipulation of an exported from frame from a popular sports video game.

Giving Day website w/ Blackbaud Luminate API integration

For the university's yearly Giving Day campaign, I built a website that implemented the Blackbaud Luminate API to display real-time gift information.
Separate API based features were developed to organize and aggregate gift information into lists and progress bars for the various departmental giving challenges and gift-matching opportunities.
This rivaled other event-based giving platforms like Kimbia, and Gravyty, but was developed entirely in-house, by me.

Soldered and built a Bleep Drum from parts

This was one of the first synthesizers I soldered together from a kit of individual parts.
This opened the door to build additional devices as well as repair existing ones.

Kungfinity game dev jam

About fifteen game developers from novice level to experts rented a house in the hills for three days and hired a private chef to work together and quickly develop prototypes for dozens of computer games.
My team included a good friend of mine who is a professional game developer, and their brother-in-law, who is an associate professor of game development at a major university.
Through our efforts, we prototyped a few games including:
- "SHEEEEEEEEP!": A "hidden in plain sight" style game.
- "Kungfinity": A martial arts, music and rhythm based infinite scroller.

Microsoft Xbox Kinect interactive music environment

Using the Microsoft Kinect, Ableton Live, Pure Data, Processing JS and some other tools, I built a projected music environment that allowed a user to control music with their hand positions, arm positions, legs and body.
After I developed some enhancements to the technology for a local DJ, they won the VICE Ray-Ban's Envision Series competition with it.

Gamepad music controller

Initially developed in Pure Data, I built an app that allows me to use an Xbox or similar gamepad to control sound and music via MIDI.
Using the wireless version of the controller allowed me to roam around, hundreds of feet away from the music system I was controlling.
I later recreated the application in Cycling '74 Max.

Dorkbot Chicago music mentor

I prepared a training session in music making using free "tracker" software, and presented it to about thirty attendees.
Each student started with the same demo song file I constructed, where each page of song data presented a separate lesson, and they could follow along with their own computers while I had my computer projected at the front of the room.
This was a great experience, and the positive feedback I received was very inspiring.

Basscave

A number of friends and I all had apartments in the same building.
The building had a vacant storefront that the building manager agreed to rent to me at a greatly reduced monthly rent.
A group of us remodeled the storefront, clearing all the junk out, cleaning it up, tore down the drop-ceiling, and painted the interior black.
After installing two powered 18" Electro-Voice subwoofers alongside the 15" PA system, we dubbed the space "The Basscave"
It was open for several years where we were able to host various film events, creative workshops, parties, and other work related events.
There was too much bass.

Tetris DS

My top score in Tetris DS is 862,000

My good friend and I were competing for a while.
Tetris DS is the best version of Tetris.
I also have a story about Tengen Tetris.

Schism Tracker High-pass filter mod

A version of the music software I had been using for over a decade has been released as open-source.
The original software had the feature of being able to apply a resonant filter to any instrument or channel, but only a low-pass filter was ever available.
I modified the open-source version of the software to add a high-pass filter alongside the low-pass filter.

UR Chicago website

I built a new Drupal based website for UR Chicago an online magazine covering regional and national lifestyles and entertainment.
In addition to it's various story content types, I also developed a custom music player for it that would feature music from local scenes around Chicago.

Drupal-based Intranet

For an Emmy and Webby award winning Chicago design firm, I worked with one of their team leads to develop a Drupal based intranet to serve as the homepage of their internal workstation Internet browsers.
Some of the Intranet's features included a daily internal news blog feed, an image gallery, and a music player.
Due to some issues with their IT services, I couldn't access their internal web server via SSH or SFTP, but I did have RDP access, so I was able to install a service to allow for a reverse-SSH tunnel back to my own local dev environment, and bypass any limitations that would impede development.

Multi-format ringtone auto-generator

After a few months of freelance work creating, editing and generating custom ringtones, I saw an opportunity to speed up the process by automating the transcoding of various formats rather than performing the transcoding manually.
I discovered methods to batch-process the audio files via command-line where previously it was thought the files could only be transcoded with one or more proprietary GUI interfaces.
Some of the interesting clients were:
One of the interesting audio formats included Thomas Dolby's "Beatnik" format.

Music programming for Charlie Trotter's restaurant, Chicago

I did not see this coming, but I was offered the opportunity to curate hours of music programming for the "muzak" system at Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago.
The result was six playlists, in the form of CDs, where each playlist had a different theme.
A few of the themes where: "World Music", trip-hop and deep house.
Unexpectedly, the restaurant's management gifted me with an invite for two complimentary VIP dining experiences.

Cut + Paste graphic design competition

Cut + Paste is a digital design tournament where designers quickly create designs on the fly based on specific themes and limitations which are then judged by a panel.
I was asked to perform background and interstitial music for the event.
The music was controlled via a wireless xbox controller.

Laptop Battle, Chicago / Seattle

I won the regional Laptop Battle music competition in Chicago

They flew me to Seattle, where I was a runner-up for the national championship
I used a combination of a gamepad and a three-axis optical sensor for MIDI performance

Ford Focus SVT repairs and upgrades

After acquiring a Ford Focus SVT hatchback, I became more interested in performing my own car maintenance and learning more about how cars worked.
I replaced my own brake discs and pads as well as brake calipers that needed repair.
I installed a more durable and sporty lower engine mount that makes a significant impact in how the car handles.
I later diagnosed my own transmission problems and determined the parts I needed to fix it, allowing me to save about $5,000 in repairs and put nearly 200,000mi on the car before selling it.

Datacenter migration

Late at night, taking turns driving a royal blue utility van with wild suspension issues, we loaded and migrated about 10,000lbs of servers, routers and switches in four or five sixty-mile roundtrips between datacenters.
The other half of the migration involved meticulously patching and powering all of the equipment as quickly as possible to minimize downtime.

IronChefofMusic

The concept for Iron Chef of Music started in Pittsburgh, PA, but after being introduced to it by a friend, we started hosting the event at Chicago's Heaven Gallery.
As I took over the role of managing and organizing Iron Chef of Music, I also built a new Drupal website to host the roster of musicians and their uploaded music.
Over the years, I've upgraded the site from D6 to D10, often adding new features and experimenting with the layout an UX, also building a custom music player that displays the waveform of the audio and allows the visitor to seek through the song visually, similar to how Soundcloud displays songs.
The current experiment is to host the roster and remixes solely on Mastodon, which gives the users more power to control how their music is shared, and doesn't force them to maintain an account on yet another website.

Red Bull Music Academy

I was chosen to be a Red Bull Music Academy attendee for their Melbourne, Australia session.

I spent two weeks with about twenty other musicians in a large loft consisting of multiple recording studios, a lecture hall and cafeteria.
Each day consisted of studio time, lectures from popular musicians and mentors and performances by different attendees each evening.
It was a very rewarding experience, but I do not think the organizers were expecting my unique approach to music making.

Kayako plugin to enable auto-linking of ticket IDs

The support team used the ticketing system Kayako, and I identified a problem in how it required for searching for cross-referenced ticket IDs rather than simply linking them within the body of the ticket messages or notes.
This greatly increased the number of steps involved in the application's workflow.
I developed an add-on that automatically identified inline ticket IDs and linked them directly to their respective tickets,

Flowbee

I used the Flowbee once, and permanently switched.

It was actually the pet version of the Flowbee my aunts gave me as a gift, made of green plastic rather than black.
It's the same thing.
I later used it in a performance art event with Douggpound

Heaven Gallery branded stairway

I lived in an art gallery for about four years. One late night we brainstormed how we wanted to repaint the stairway leading to the gallery using the gallery's logo.

From the perspective of the bottom of the stairs, we projected the logo and traced an outline
The result was very effective and striking, lasting to this day

Visual Basic app development

When sampling sounds from records or VHS cassettes, the typical process would be to start playing the media, listen for a sound you want to sample, and once a desirable sample is discovered, rewind the media, hit record on your audio editor, save the result, and go back and edit it later.
To make the process easier, I developed an app that is always recording with a buffer that may be defied as a number of seconds. Once a sound the user wants to sample is heard, all they need to do is hit the spacebar within the buffer time, perhaps three seconds, and a recording is automatically saved an numbered, prepended with a filename that the user enters before recording begins.
The result is a batch of easy to edit samples named something like: fozzie-001.wav, fozzie-002.wav, fozzie-003.wav, ...

Done Records

I ran a small CD duplication business in Chicago.

To keep things simple, I only offered monochrome print using a CD duplicator robot and thermal printer.
Most jobs used a combination of the Playstation style discs with the black bottoms and translucent silver anti-static ziploc bags rather than jewel cases.

Developed a CMS from scratch that a seventy year old could use

It was for a personal-safety / self-defense instructor.
I designed the login system and content manage interface to be as simple as possible, with nothing more than the seventy year old user needed.
This was before Wordpress and Drupal.
They used it for years!

Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA) certification

This certification may no longer exist, but I still find it occasionally useful to the present day.
I earned the certification as part of professional development at the first datacenter I worked for.

The Digital Underground

My band opened for The Digital Underground at a performance in Chicago.

You may be familiar with "The Humpty Dance".
We wore spraypainted jumpsuits we acquired from American Science and Surplus.

Developed an outage tracker for our ISP support team

I noticed a trend where after a surge in support calls, it would take hours for the network operations team to notify the support team that we should start informing callers from a specific area about an outage.
I developed a web based tool that allowed the support team to crowdsource the tracking of outage locations so the team could have a clear idea if an outage was emerging, and speed up the support process.

Flash music machines

For my band's website, I developed a Macromedia Flash based website, that also included a few "groovebox" style music machines which were also Flash-based.
Each machine had a different theme and personality, like audio samples of sounds from cooking with the wok in the kitchen or satirical versions of existing groovebox sounds and overused audio samples.
DJ Coldcut once said in an interview that my website was his favorite music machine.

Shoutbox

I wanted to learn how to add a "shoutbox" to my band's website that I had developed, so I learned a little PHP and MySQL for the first time.
This allowed visitors to the site to leave personal messages for my band that displayed publicly.
It could probably have benefited from some form of moderation system, but it was my first database driven web application!

Battle of the Bands

My friends and I performed at our high school Battle of the Bands competition with our large, heavy, beige desktop computers

DOS based .mod trackers were used to sequence samples and instruments
We lost the judges' vote
We won the audience vote
The band that won had their parents in the band

I ran 1,000 miles in ninety days

As part of a summer training program, I ran 1,000 miles in ninety days.
Each weekday had morning and evening sessions of about ten to twenty miles each.
Saturday mornings had one long session of about thirty miles on the Illinois prairie path.
I wore out three pairs of running shoes, two pair of Nike Air Structure Triax, and one pair of Nike Air Max Triax.
I recall one one day I had an especially long session that added up to about two complete marathons at once was also the day I listened to one of the most formative music albums of my life.

Solar powered car

I built a solar powered car as part of the Solar Car Challenge in Washington DC.

I was not allowed to compete, because my mom was one of the organizers.
I met Al Gore, who promised to get me one of the t-shirts made from recycled plastic bottles, but he didn't.

Young Author's Competitions

Before my interests became more focused on web development and technomusicology, I was primarily interested in writing stories and drawing comics as a creative outlet.
I think looking back at the timeline, the creative shift was caused by computers being introduced into my home and a MIDI course being offered at my school.
Otherwise, I was a shoo-in just about every season I entered the local Young Author's contest.
This is intended to simply be a reflection, not a brag about writing books for kids when I was a kid!
I would like to bring my drawing skills to the next level and start a web comic some day, though.
There was even the time a traveling theatre troupe acted out one of my stories in front of the entire school.

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