I’ve never been especially good at being only one thing—or, apparently, at choosing the ordinary route into anything.
I started using computers when doing so involved punched cards. These days I design security systems that help organizations move faster without losing control of what matters. The work between those points has taken me from network protocols to enterprise architecture, cloud risk, and AI governance. Along the way, I’ve supported NASA missions and helped a few three-letter agencies fulfill theirs—with, I hope, everyone a little safer afterward.
For a while I was also a professional penetration tester. Banks, universities, energy companies, and law-enforcement agencies asked me to break into their systems and sometimes their buildings so I could show them where they were vulnerable. I used to describe the job as Robert Redford in Sneakers, only with more girth.
The formal version is on LinkedIn. It is accurate, but it leaves out a few things.
At fifteen, I left with a carnival long enough to be reported as a runaway. In a different school year, I became the house magician at a club in the French Quarter by pretending to be twenty-three. I have operated roller coasters in more than one state, rented a theater to understand film noir, taught photographers to light dinosaurs after hours in a natural-science museum, followed moonlight through a marsh, and driven a Jeep named Anne into the Chihuahuan Desert.
I make photographs because a camera changes the way I see. I go outdoors because nature returns scale and texture to the world. I write when a story or question refuses to leave me alone.
Some of those adventures became photographs. Some became stories. Many began with the same question: What happens if I look a little closer?
The common thread is curiosity—understanding how things connect, what happens at the boundaries, and what becomes visible when you give it your full attention. Technology, photography, nature, and writing are not separate lives. They are different instruments for exploring the same world.
For years this site held pieces of that exploration: photographs, experiments, technical ideas, nature notes, and personal stories. Then it became quiet. The archive stayed, but the person behind it kept changing.
This is the site coming back to life.
You’ll find older work here with its place in time intact, alongside new stories and photographs. I’m less interested in forcing them into separate boxes than in noticing where they meet—and in following whatever becomes interesting next.
Here, there is room for the rest of the story.
Technologist. Photographer. Naturalist. Thinker. Different ways of paying attention to the same world.
