This is what I actually do all day.

Five kids, and for most of their childhood a simple rule: when we could get out, we got out. Kayaks, a trout pond, a tent under the oaks in December, a canyon in Arizona, four days in Yosemite with one son and a pack each. Later, when they were grown, two years on the road with Suzanne.

The pictures are the story here, so I've given them their own page. My mother has hers.

A lot of what I make starts with a person, not a problem. My dad has spent decades building a family tree of nearly twenty thousand people, and I want it to read like a magazine instead of a database. Other things I have made for people are smaller and do not have repositories.

These are the projects I am most careful with, because the thing I am touching belongs to someone else.

I keep coming back to the idea of a machine you can just talk to. Not a phone tree, not a search box. Something that listens, waits when you pause, and stops the moment you interrupt. I have built it twice for the house and once for the office phone.

The first one had a tiny face and a bad attitude. The second one is warm and curious. The third one answers my business line and politely gets rid of robocalls.

Most of my paid work is for small, local businesses: a baseball training facility, a one-person marketing studio, a trucking company, a compliance firm. I do the whole thing, brand to website to phone line to the automations behind them.

The part I am proudest of is how each one ends. The owner changes their own hours. They add their own products. They search their own history. I build the handoff in on purpose, and then write the plain-language guide that makes it real.

Before any of the software, there was a book. It treats a company like a theatre ensemble: rehearsal, rhythm, silence, timing, the moment before the curtain. Most of what I have built since is that book, tried in a different medium.

There is also a graphic novel about learning to sit down with my own self-doubt, and a drawer full of essays from the years I spent coaching business owners.

I am optimistic about AI and I do not trust it. Both at once. So I experiment in public, keep the failures, and write down what actually happened. I tried to give an AI a personality five different ways before one stuck. I built a weekly brief that writes itself from government data. And the smallest thing I have ever made runs every morning at seven, unsupervised, filing my meeting notes.

I do not type the code any more. I write down what should exist, what is out of bounds, and how we will know it works, and AI agents do the typing under rules I enforce.

Cycling, a hundred miles at a time. Backpacking, from Havasu Falls to Yosemite to a canyon in Sedona. Rock climbing with the kids on the other end of the rope. Dogs, sometimes five at once. And two years of dirt roads and salt flats with a camera.

All of it, with pictures.

Hot air balloons inflating in a field in Greeley before the sun is up. Flowers, close enough to lose the edges. A sailing trip where the horizon would not hold still. Photography is where I go when I want to stop building and just look.

The galleries live on their own site. Here are a few to start.

I have spent my whole working life in IT, more than forty years of it. Somewhere along the way I noticed that the decisions at the top of a company were often being made in a vacuum, and that the real fixes were rarely technical.

So I stepped out to coach business owners for a while, under a name I still use for my email: The Outside Perspectives. That became Synavia, which is where the book, the consulting, and the AI experiments all live now.

As a boy I was close to an uncle who saw the world differently than I did, and I spent a lot of time interpreting it for him. To be understood I had to describe things with total specificity and honesty. That is still how I try to work.

"The line between our business lives and our personal lives is imaginary."