Hobbies

My grandpa, owner and master tech of Pro TV, a true renaissance man, ran a TV repair shop and fixed arcade machines, robots, RC cars, and VCRs. My brother and I hung out in the back room so customers wouldn't see us, watching him solder and troubleshoot everything that came through the door. Eventually I started picking up the soldering iron myself - melting solder, playing with pulled components, just poking around to learn how things worked. That's the origin of everything electronics for me.

During library time I rushed straight to the 700s (arts) section every single time - origami books, how-to-draw books, puzzle and riddle books, Magic Eye books. I got genuinely good at origami as a kid. My childhood revolved around this stuff: arts & crafts, electronics, woodworking.

Same grandpa as the TV shop, also a master woodworker - he built the majority of his own house and a playhouse for us kids in the 80s. He also built furniture - tables and chairs with fancy finishes - and used to take me to lumber yards before Lowe's and Home Depot were around, teaching me the lingo and what to look for. Waking up on weekends to sawdust and a circular saw through fresh 2x4s was just normal life.

I worked the ovens and took it seriously - I wanted every pizza to come out perfect. I learned how dough is made, how it proofs and rests, and the difference between green dough and dough that's ready. I carried it home and started making pizza for the family, and got hooked on the dough process itself.

I bought a first car that broke down constantly. My dad ran a mechanic shop and made me fix it myself using All-Data printouts instead of just doing it for me. That's where I learned to follow technical instructions, troubleshoot, and apply a little elbow grease and ingenuity - the general DIY-repair mindset that shows up in every hobby since.

I bought my first computer, an old Macintosh PowerBook, plus a PC card modem and learned all about phone lines and modulating/demodulating. Mac compatibility issues pushed me to look at buying a PC - too expensive, so I researched, asked around, and ended up building one from scratch instead.

I built "punt blockers" to defend against AOL hackers - my first taste of scripting. Then I discovered "View Source," went to the library to learn HTML, and started editing and hosting my own flat-file sites. I picked up P2P file transferring, then found Perl (login systems) and PHP (AOL-style forums), and became fascinated with how to store data. There were times I would come home from school get on my computer to do a little coding and before I knew it, it was morning for school the next day. Mind you, this was before YouTube, social media, online resources, or even google. I had to just figure it out. That fascination became the seed of my career.

I joined the military and trained in PMEL (calibration/metrology), with formal training in mechanical and electrical engineering. I was fascinated by radio waves and frequency modulation, though the hands-on work was mostly physical/dimensional metrology - pressure, weights, thermocouples, triple state. An additional duty as Hazmat monitor sparked an interest in documentation and procedures that still carries into how I run projects today.

I worked as a calibration technician at Southwest Research Institute, riding a golf cart around campus to calibrate equipment for a huge range of departments - everything from weighing things on a tiny mirror-and-optics analytical balance encased in glass (precise to about 0.1 milligrams - fine enough to detect a single grain of salt) to launching chickens out of a high-pressure cannon to test impact on an airplane. One stop was the NASA department, where I calibrated the scale used to weigh the plutonium going onto New Horizons, which launched in 2006 and reached Pluto in 2015. "Why plutonium?" sent me down a research rabbit hole, and with my PMEL background in thermocouples, understanding how that plutonium actually powered the spacecraft is what first got me fascinated with space.

I started down an electrical/mechanical engineering path at USAA, but it was too slow and I needed to work. I went to tech school for database administration instead, to chase that "how does data work" thread from the AOL/PHP days. From there I moved into building full stack projects - a direct line from AOL-era web curiosity to a career. Also during that time, I helped my grandpa build a big shed in the backyard: laid the foundation, built the walls, learned how structure actually works.

I saw a little indoor toy drone at a store, bought it, and that spiraled into building a full FPV racing drone - early FPV-drone days, right around when my daughter was born. I sourced every component individually: flight controller, motors, carbon fiber frame, a small camera wired to an FM transmitter for FPV video, goggles to view the feed live, and a high-end FrSky Taranis radio to fly it.

Getting married and starting a family kicked off a huge expansion of active hobbies - ham radio, Arduino and microcontrollers, 3D printing, Fusion 360 CAD, an embroidery machine, airbrushing, a paludarium built for my daughter's rescued toads, astronomy that started with explaining Orion to my son, custom trading cards for my daughter, amiibo/NFC programming, and retro gaming builds for my son. Almost every one of these traces back to something my wife or one of my kids asked for or got excited about - see the grid below for the full breakdown.