1. My biggest hobby is photography, I primarily do landscape and nature photography (above). I love going out and spending time in nature. I don’t like taking pictures of people. There are many people that say that they prefer people because they can be posed, but you can make a tree pose in the exact position that you want. That may be true but the tree doesn’t argue.
2. I have been working in the AV world for almost 25 years. It started in college when I was the Chief Engineer of our radio station when I took apart the station, reconfigured it and put it back together. I then began working at GE in Schenectady which allowed me to travel Atlanta, GA and Greenville, SC many times. I was also able to go to Singapore and France.
3. While I am not a graduate of Siena, my wife Tracey is. We were married on March 17, 2007 at St Patrick’s Church in Troy with a huge snow storm the day before.
4. My favorite musician is Ben Harper. I have seen him in concert seven times and had the honor to meet him twice. The first time we were told that we could only get one photo or autograph. I got a poster signed but then a friend took my camera and took the pic of men and Ben (below). (BTW…I look like a fool.) The second time I met him, Tracey was with me and after the show, she told him that we used his song, “Not Fire, Not Ice” as our wedding song and thanked him. He stopped her mid-sentence and said “No, thank you, it’s an honor for me to know that my song means that much to you and has been used for such an important event.” Wow, we all hear the stories of how our heroes can let us down, this was so far from that.
5. I am a huge music fan (especially live music) and have been to over 300 concerts. I have even seen one of my favorite bands, Conehead Buddha, over 50 times.
6. The first time that I traveled for work was when I was working at GE and we sent to Atlanta to webcast the yearly sales meeting. I was down there for about a day when I got a call from my manager that the webcast portion of the meeting was cancelled and that I needed to go pack up the equipment and get back to the office. I walked into what I thought was an empty meeting room. Upon walking in I notice that there were two people sitting at a table on the far side of the stage, but thought nothing of it. I proceeded to the backstage area to start packing up. As soon as I walked through the curtain I was approached be a man in a suit who proceeded to ask me “Who the @#$% am I, and what the @#$% was I doing back there?” I told him what I was doing and he told me to hurry up and get out. I hurried up, packed up and started to leave. When leaving I looked over closer to the two guys that were still there and realized that it was Bob Nardelli (GE Power CEO at the time) and Colin Powell.
7. My favorite board game is Monopoly, I have over 30 different versions, books, plates, mugs and more from the game (below).
8. I am ambidextrous with most things, the only thing that I do 100% left handed is write. I can even throw a ball with both arms at the same time.
9. It was September 10, 2001, I was at the Albany airport waiting to board my plane to head to Atlanta for a quick one day trip to support the broadcast of a meeting. Shortly before the boarding there were people milling around just waiting like me. There was a gentleman that was wearing a LSU had sitting reading a book. Another man walked up to him introduced himself, he told him that he was an alum and asked if he was too, he responded no, that he was a faculty member there. The alum then asked what he taught and the faculty member responded with “I teach airline terrorism”. OK there’s that, then we sat on the tarmac for two and a half hours. That night I was awake at the GE office until 2:30 AM working on getting a webcast our 15 servers around the world. The next morning we all know what happened and changed our lives forever. Needless to say the broadcast that brought me down there was cancelled and a co-worker and I had to drive back to Albany from Atlanta.
10. During the spring of 2000 there was potentially going to be a strike at GE between the corporation and the unionized employees. As part of this any people that were inside the gates of the campus when the strike started were stuck inside the gates. Leading up to this there were a lot of preparations going on, including creating a living area for the security officers on the second floor of their building. This building did not have cable TV and because it was in the middle of the campus we had to get creative with how to get a TV signal in there. Ultimately we went with an antenna on the roof of the building. What was interesting about this is that the day that we got this working for the first time was on May 22, which was the 70th anniversary of the first television broadcast in history. Which was broadcast from the GE campus to Proctors Theater where he conducted the orchestra remotely.
