I am the Director of Information Technology and Chief Information Security Officer for an ecommerce / production company in Silicon Valley, California; I’m a graphic designer; web designer, web developer, musician / writer / producer; martial arts instructor and pilot. I’m not content unless I’m up to my eyes in technology – forever searching out the next challenge – always working at the very edge of technology – pushing the limits daily on a vertical learning curve, and I wouldn’t have it any other way – stress is my friend, my sanity, a constant that will keep me moving, thinking, learning and winning of course. That being said, we all have our limits, but you have to push very hard to hit mine – actually, I have to push very hard to hit mine.
Doing my job is a passion – which isn’t a bad thing when you are being paid for it. The joy of having a hyperactive mind is being able to use it and be paid. Sometimes your sanity is called into question when you are deemed as right and left brained since it is said that having both drives one insane. Normal I am not, nor do I have any desire to be since normal is a definition of ‘average’ to me, and I am anything but average.
My graphic design skills moved from vector graphic designed in Adobe Illustrator to designing websites in Adobe Photoshop. That was challenge since learning to manually create some effects was quite difficult. From there I decided to code the PSD templates into CSS templates – that was fun – creating some of the effects using CSS was an eye opener also. The last part to that portion of learning was converting CSS to PHP, namely WordPress themes. That was difficult to start but once I got the hang of it I found I could add an options pane to the admin panel, and much more. What a ride!
Now, I’m designing using WP-Framework since it’s already coded, and I can hook some of the functions into the framework quite well. The challenge is going to move to JQuery next – perhaps. Who knows? I’m having too much fun in the WordPress arena so I’ll be here a while.
