I was born in a small town in southern Idaho. During my childhood, I thought that my life was fairly average. I lived on a small family farm. I went to school, I worked, and I played. As a grew, I was to learn that my experiences were different from other people that I knew. I would talk to other childern and they would talk about all the responsibilities that they had to do like taking out the trash and making their beds. I would be hard for me not to laugh. My life was much different. Living on a small farm required that both me and my older sister be active members. We had to work for our food. For a long time, I was jealous of the other children and their simple lives. It was at this point during the early years of my life that I became interested in space. I think it was because I wanted to leave my situation so badly and it is hard for people to get farther way than outer space.

However over the years, I came to respect the things that I had learned on that small farm. I learned a strong work ethic. Additionally I learned to develop my memory and reasoning skills. When you are all by yourself, it is little fun not being able to remember information. Furthermore, the greatest thing that I learned was to develop my memory and to never stop reaching for the stars. These skills would serve me well over the coming years.

School was always easy for me. If I had not come from the background that I did, I probably would not have been as good of student. During my early years, it never occurred to me to not study or not do my homework. I was one of obnoxious children that actually liked to go to school. As I entered into junior and senior high school, it was more of the same. Unlike most children, I do not have the emotional scars from the events. I by no means am suggesting that I was an overly popular person, but I learned at a very young age to have a very thick skin. So events that largely may have led to trauma for a child were largely ignored by me.

I was one of these incredibly obnoxious students who not only participated in everything, but also excelled at most. I was captain of the varisty football team, editor of the school newspaper, active in speech and drama, and won more awards than I care to think about. I look back on that time and I wonder when I had time to sleep or have a social life. At the time it simply seemed like the thing to do.

When I was a junior in high school, my hard work paid off and I had the opportunity to take part in a school to work program. The program was designed for myself and three other students to travel to a neighboring town and learn how to produce our school yearbook digitally. We had the wonderful fortune to be going to a small home business that had two people whom had been working in desktop publishing since its inception and before. They had semiretired from their business and offered to teach us the ropes. Those were some of my happiest memories. I would go there and spend the entire afternoon learning how to use Adobe Photoshop and PageMaker, and more importantly, I was introduced to a Macintosh. I feel in love with not only what I was doing but the people I was around. The wonderful company continued to help me reach for the stars, and by the time I left their tutelage, I finally had skills that I knew would allow me to reach those stars.

I came to the University of Idaho in January 1997. I began my career in the College of Art and Architecture. I planned to study Graphic Design, and put those skills I had learned to good use. Like high school, I remained active in several different things over the course of the first few years. I visited a art gallery in town and after talking with the owner for awhile, she agreed to show some of my work. She also directed me to the owners of a weekly newspaper at the time called The AdMart. After meeting with them, I would spend the next year producing all of the advertisements and layout for the paper. It was a lot of late nights, early mornings, but also a lot of fun and it paid the bills. From there, I had the fortune of taking a ethics class from the chair of the Philosophy Department. We got to become friends, and I soon found myself designing websites for projects that she was affiliated with, and later for several departments in the College of Letters and Science. I would then take a job at the University Bookstore where I served as the Apple Computer Technician. They were the only authorized Apple Repair Center in the quad cities. It was a huge amount of fun. However it became clear that if I was ever going to leave the University of Idaho with a degree that I would have to quit working and start focusing on my academics.

Over the first couple of years, it became clear that I was not destined to receive a degree from the College of Art and Architecture. I did not want to become an artist and that was what they were training there students for. Maybe I am crazy, but I like to afford to buy food and the whole idea of the starving artist just did not appeal to me. So I switched to the School of Communication to study Visual Communication. It was the best move that I made while I was here at the University of Idaho. While the program was not as technically advanced as the Graphic Design program, it allowed for a much greater amount of flexibility in what a student chooses to study. At that point in my college career, I already knew what I was going to be doing after college, and the skills that I needed to learn would not be taught an any classroom at this university. So instead I tried to get as diverse of an education as I could.

So that brings me up to the present. If you have read this far, you may be asking yourself, now what is he going to do with the rest of his life? Well I am glad that you asked. :) Well do you remember that small home business that I mentioned earlier. Well, they got tired of the semiretired lifestyle. Seeing the opportunity to acquire a very large screen printer for pennies on the dollar, they got together some investors and acquired the company. The result is a company that now does work for the likes of Disney, Lucas Arts, and WalMart. I have been involved with the new company since its inception. I will be joining them full time in August of 2002. From there, who knows were my life will go. One thing is clear, I will continue to reach for the stars.