When I find a break in the matrix, I seize the opportunity. In high school I learned numerous programming languages and won programming competitions, as well as drawing competitions. By college, I had interned at IBM to work on the “multimedia build” and merged the worlds of art and software with 3D models, animation, ray-tracing, photography, machine sculpture, and so forth.

As an art student with IBM on my resume, finding web development and SEO work was easy. Shortly after graduating with a BFA in 1999, I created my own web crawler while working at Mercury Communications, a Florida ISP. Then my experiments with affiliate programs began to pay off. I went freelance with a traffic brokering system I coded in Perl, pioneering new analytics techniques using cookies.

Since my work was somewhat automated between Y2K and 2004, I had time to read books, participate in poetry events, and try new cigars, tequilas, wines, and food. I painted my girlfriends and hosted art shows. I listened to the stories of old men. I watched sunsets, wandered new cities in my turbo GTI, and wondered about the meaning of life. That period of time wasn’t all fun and games. I wrote my first “ebook” information product and created PHP analytics software to detect click fraud coming from anonymous proxies.

In 2004 I moved to Texas to get reacquainted with my family. Right after Adsense launched, I started blogging. While studying Magazine Writing in San Antonio, one of my articles about social media received millions of views. Nobody offered “WordPress hosting” yet. So I advanced my Linux and MySQL knowledge to scale my own WordPress servers. Then leveraged my SEO experience to rank #1 in Google for “WordPress programmer” to focus on serving WordPress clients.

More recently, I enjoy teaching classes online and in person. From system administration to abstract painting, to affiliate marketing, to hypnosis and visualization, I’m always learning and teaching new concepts and techniques. While at the same time, I like to focus and keep unnecessary complexity out of my life.