I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the spring of 1967. My family lived in both Kalamazoo and Portage, a small city just south of Kalamazoo, until 1978, when my mother remarried and we moved to suburban Detroit.

I lived in Troy, a fairly new suburb at the time (it had been incorporated back in the mid-1950s), where everything was still under construction and there was very little to do that did not involve using a car to get there. We lived in the Somerset Park Apartments, and I attended Boulan Park Middle School and Troy High School.

After graduating from high school, I went off to MIT, where I majored in Physics and did my humanities concentration in Philosophy. I spent a year at the University of Michigan and then finished up at MIT in 1991.

After graduation, I bounced around various jobs in the Boston area, never really finding anything that I liked. After visiting an old girlfriend who was living in LA, I decided that I needed a change in my life, and so in the fall of 1992, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was able to find work pretty quickly, over at Sega of America, but I left there after a few months. I then took a job with Creative Labs, the outfit that make SoundBlaster cards and other fine multimedia products. I stayed there for over a year, even accepting a job transfer to Oklahoma, to help set up and run the tech-support center in Stillwater.

As it turned out, I hated Oklahoma, and was desparate to get out. A friend of mine back in California was able to hook me up with a small sound-card maker, Calypso Micro Products, so I quit Creative and went back to the Bay Area to work there.

Calypso turned out to be an enormous fiasco. I stayed there for several months, until the company fell apart (mostly because the principals of the company didn't know what the hell they were doing). I was out of work for a couple of weeks, and then I hooked up with another company, Videomail, Inc., a maker of video-capture hardware.

I stayed with Videomail for almost nine years, a long time by Silicon Valley standards. Eventually, I decided to leave for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that I'd been there for too long and I needed to find new challenges.

Find them I did. In late 2003, I decided to relocate to Puerto Rico, where my mother's family is from. There are a lot of opportunities here on the island, if you know where to look.

Since coming here, I've started a new company, Antilles Systems and Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in Open-Source software development.