Hi there, Hello!
I’m Usually Building Something
I’ve never been very good at having just one hobby.
I tend to bounce between projects depending on whatever has grabbed my attention at the moment. That might mean 3D printing something ridiculous, working out a new recipe, writing a heavy-metal song about an obscure subject, messing with an old car, or spending way too much time trying to make some piece of software do something it was never really intended to do.
That’s pretty much how this site came about too.
Lately, a lot of my creative energy has gone into 3D and UV Printing, where I make custom magnets, UV-printed items, license plates, and 3D prints. I like the whole process — coming up with an idea, figuring out how to make it, testing it, fixing whatever went wrong the first time, and eventually ending up with something real that didn’t exist before.
That same instinct has followed me into music. I like taking subjects that probably have no business being turned into songs and doing it anyway. Sometimes it’s something serious. Sometimes it’s a memory trick. Sometimes it’s just funny.
One recent example was writing a heavy-metal song to help pronounce the full name of Lake Webster:
Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.
It worked a little too well. I can pretty much say it on command now.
Cooking works the same way for me. I rarely leave a recipe alone. I’m usually changing ingredients, weighing everything, figuring out the nutrition afterward, and deciding whether the experiment was good enough to make again. Some meals start with a real plan. Others start with, “Well, I have two cans of chicken, some squash, and a bunch of cheese…”
And then there was the BMW.
The Car That Opened a Whole Different World
One of the strangest and most memorable projects I ever got involved with was restoring the actual BMW used by Griff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II.
Not a replica.
The actual screen-used car.
I bought it in 2004 and spent hurried weeks bringing it back to the way people remembered it from the movie. The restoration itself was a huge project, but over time I realized the car was becoming a lot more than that.
It introduced me to people I never would have met otherwise.
Through the BMW, I got pulled deeper into the Back to the Future community, but it went well beyond that. I met collectors, builders, restorers, prop people, movie-car owners, replica builders, and fans who had devoted an unbelievable amount of time to preserving pieces of film history.
Some of those people had incredible stories of their own.
A project that started with one battered movie car turned into years of events, friendships, conversations, interviews, and experiences that I never could have predicted when I first got involved.
I owned the BMW for about eleven years and eventually sold it in 2015 — appropriately enough, the same year Back to the Future Part II had imagined as “the future.”
The car moved on, but the people I met and the experiences that came from owning it never really did.
I Like Following Weird Ideas
That’s probably the common thread through most of what I do.
I like projects that lead somewhere unexpected.
Sometimes that means building something physical. Sometimes it means trying to teach an AI agent to play PAC-MAN 256. Sometimes it means figuring out whether an NFC chip can be hidden inside a fridge magnet. Sometimes it means writing a song about something nobody else would ever think needed a song.
The fun part is usually not knowing exactly where the idea is going when I start.
This site is basically a home for all of that — projects, restorations, music, cooking experiments, 3D prints, strange ideas, things that worked, things that absolutely did not work, and whatever I happen to get interested in next.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of it, it’s this:
The best projects usually start with, “I wonder if I can…”