Born and raised in northern New Jersey, my first computer was a Commodore C128 around 1988. I subscribed to a forgotten Commodore magazine which included, among other things, BASIC code for games. One of the first things I can remember doing on my C128 was programming a simple game called Verti-Bird, weighing in at around 1000 lines of code. Your task in the game was to land a moving helicopter onto an inverted-triangle pad with a connect point of 1px. I was 11 years old.
We owned an Atari VCS (2600), and I was amazed at the variety of games that it supproted.   But eventually, I became bored with its simple graphics and, towards the end, poor gameplay.

Then all my friends and I purchased a C128 game that was going to be pivotal point in my computer career: Ultima V. We spent countless hours, sometimes literally days at a clip, in our basements completely addicted to this game. It was through Ultima V that I learned computers could make music, scroll graphics, and completely submerge the player into a world that was as real as you believed it was. Shortly thereafter, my interest in games and presentation was solidified with the Nintendo NES.

I played sports in high school, baseball and soccer. At home, I ran my own 4-node BBS on an IBM PS/2 70, 386-DX33, with 6MB of RAM and a 160MB hard drive. I became engrossed in an engineering drafting class where I was learning what engineering design, blueprinting, and geometric layout had to do with presentation, scalability, and look. Both my artistic and web design strategies began here.

While working in an Egghead Software store I was approached by Phil Chernack and we discussed forming a computer and information consulting firm. In 1995 I was accepted to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Celerity Communications, LLC was founded in early 1996. Through Celerity I have been able to develop my design, management, and development skills in an actual business environment. In 1998 Celerity employed over a dozen people, creating enterprise solutions for companies such as Hoffman-La Roche and Cynosure, Inc.

In May 2001 I became a full-time Web Developer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and 6 months later I became the official Webmaster. I am responsible for NJIT's website at www.njit.edu which is roughly 17,000 pages.