Who am I?
Feeling thankful, and allowing space to reflect.
I woke up today feeling reflective and proud of how much life I’ve packed into my years. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the giant leaps I’ve made—both in my career as an IT leader and in my personal journey to live more authentically. It feels good to pause, breathe, and recognize the person I’ve become.
Starting with Why
Mid‑life hands you a rear‑view mirror and a high‑beam flashlight at the same time. Somewhere between coaching my kids through homework and swapping an engine on a Saturday, I realized I had been living by instinct more than explanation. This page is my attempt to articulate the why: for Danika and Kaden, for myself, and for anyone else charting a course that refuses complacency. I want my kids to inherit more than tools and tech tips. I want them to see how curiosity, efficiency, and straight‑talk can turn raw time into meaningful chapters. If a stranger finds value here too, even better.
Daily Rituals
I wake before dawn, long before the sun scours the marine layer off the California coast, because that hush is where the fire inside me gets stoked. Maybe it’s the Viking blood. Maybe it’s the Chinese‑zodiac Fire Dragon that never quits. The ritual stays constant: porch light low or off, a quick round of coffee doping with café con leche warming my hands, mockingbirds chattering while a lone raven keeps the beat. Weekdays send me down the freeway to dashboards waiting for patterns. Weekends flip the garage into off‑road repair mode, put a mountain bike under me, or gift a dawn moment of solitude in the desert’s crisp air. Different arenas, same sequence: learn, tune, test, refine, repeat. When mastery hardens into muscle memory and boredom starts to scratch, I hunt the next puzzle. It might be laying flawless TIG beads for a one‑off bracket, carving a dozen CNC revisions, or stripping an unfamiliar engine to its last bolt. That dawn‑lit discipline, and the restless curiosity behind it, remains the cleanest shorthand for who I am.
Work: Living Systems in IT
I earn my keep as a technologist who treats infrastructure like a living organism. Thirty‑plus years in IT have taught me that systems, like people, refuse to sit still. They evolve, decay, then spark back with new potential if you give them space and clear rules. I design those rules for a living: automation frameworks, incident‑response playbooks, and security architectures that quietly save companies millions by tightening gaps no one else notices. People often trigger the breakdowns, so I build self‑healing automations that pass the “so what” test and give everyone a win.
The 25th‑Hour Efficiency (Read more here)
Friends ask how I cram so many projects, workouts, and road trips into a single day. I grin and blame the 25th hour, a hidden reservoir of drive I once wrote about, but the reality is stricter, simpler time hygiene. I refuse to hemorrhage minutes comparing salsa labels. An app queues my grocery order so I can spend that reclaimed hour mastering something new. When I travel, I add secondary and tertiary objectives to the itinerary: tour the client site, scout a trailhead, draft two paragraphs in a departure lounge. Idle layovers feel like wasted time. Efficiency is not frantic multitasking; it is treating every minute like scarce RAM and loading only the processes that matter. The payoff is everywhere: servers hum clean, bodies recover faster, and risk plus burnout stay low.
Outdoor Labs
The same economy of motion follows me outdoors. When the laptops close, I trade server‑room white noise for alpine silence. On a thousand‑foot climb I hear every piston in my chest, each gear shift echoing the way a network packet hops a route. Leadville’s hundred‑mile grind and the desert’s endless fire roads are laboratories too, places where the system, this time my own body, searches for equilibrium under stress.
But the backcountry is more than a proving ground. It is where I collect memories. I love scouting new terrain and then returning with friends so they can feel that first‑time jolt. Nothing beats the whoop that erupts when a UTV drops off one dune and rockets into the next bowl at full throttle. I invest in milestones: teaching the kids to drive stick in the washes of Ocotillo Wells, swapping stories around a campfire, or sitting shoulder to shoulder as the winter‑solstice sun edges over a silent ridge. Those moments keep me grounded. The lessons they teach—resilience, presence, shared awe—ride back with me to the boardroom the very next morning.
Lunar Lineup
As a Fire Dragon, my world does not revolve around people; it ignites because of them. The ones who last in my orbit do more than vibe. They strike sparks, challenge frameworks, and ride the thermals of chaos with grace. I am drawn to Monkeys like metal to magnet. Their minds move fast and their tongues faster, weaving mischief into my need for stimulation and disruption. Then come the Snakes: elegant, silent tacticians who waste no words, but when they speak, it is a precision strike. My circle holds Dogs too, loyal and grounded, sometimes infuriatingly cautious, yet steadfast when it matters.
This is not a mystic scrapbook. It is a map. A Dragon needs both heat and ballast. Rats drift in with calculated intent, often masked as charm, and I track them like a hawk. Tigers, when aligned, ride beside me like wildfire: ferocious, untamed, alive. The lunar signs do not write the story; they ink the margins. They give me language for the instinct I already live by: read energy first, words second. The ones who understand that do not just get close. They get in.
Maverick Dragon Leadership
My leadership is forged from Viking steel and fueled by Fire Dragon intensity. I carry the blood of explorers, builders, and warriors—men who navigated the unknown with grit and intuition. That ancestral fire is alive in how I lead: instinctual, relentless, and unafraid to challenge stagnation. I do not need a map; I draw it. As a Libra born on the cusp of Scorpio, I search for harmony, but I never shy from confrontation. When clarity falters, the Scorpio edge steps in and cuts through noise with surgical precision. I believe in truth over comfort and results over rituals. My leadership is not about control. It is about energy, accountability, and transformation. I hold space for both boldness and discipline, where teams know they are safe to push boundaries because I have already drawn the ones that matter.
This approach shapes the Maverick Dragon style. I give teams an open runway for hackathons, skunk‑works, and proof‑of‑concepts that live or die in forty‑eight hours. Then I frame the chaos with uncompromising clarity: scope, metrics, guardrails. People know they can swing for the fences, and they know I will not spare the bat when the swing falls lazy. That bluntness creates psychological safety: expectations are so sharp no one has to guess what winning looks like. I use tools like the Predictive Index to place people in the right seats, and rituals such as Level 10s and HERD (Hours, Emotion, Relationships, Dollars) to keep the mission aligned. I am not here to babysit. I am here to build, break, and rebuild alongside people who thrive in the fire.
Mission and Values
I have drafted plenty of vision decks, but the plain‑language mission never changes: Technologist. Endurance athlete. Adventurer. Free‑speech absolutist. Small‑government libertine. Waste‑averse efficiency hawk. Relentless pattern‑hunter. I lean center‑right, a stance I call pragmatic liberty, yet the aperture stays wide for anyone who brings facts and civility. The eggshells were swept up long ago. I will not tiptoe around calls for equality that excuse themselves from reciprocity. I would rather hash things out on a ridgeline, around a campfire, or in a comment thread that prizes evidence over echo. I am in a committed relationship with a man named Chris. Whether that fits neatly into a label feels beside the point. Labels matter less than candor. If any of this tightens your jaw, we can part as strangers, no hard feelings. If it sparks curiosity, expect meme autopsies, fact‑checks that swing both directions, and conversations vigorous enough to leave scuffs on us both.
Why I Write
All of the above bleeds into this page. I write about streamlined systems and brutal climbs, about historical rabbit holes and why I believe pattern recognition can be a spiritual practice. Some posts dive deep into performance metrics. Others capture a sunrise over a cracked desert playa. Each one asks the same question: How do we live and build without wasting the finite charge we have been given?
Books That Shaped My Lens
Good to Great – disciplined focus on what you can be best at.
Start With Why – purpose and history matter more than flashy features.
The Ethical Slut – dismantles default scripts about intimacy and teaches radical communication.
Traction – proves that knowing your numbers turns daily grind into visible wins.
Excellence Wins – Horst Schulze’s humble blueprint for world‑class standards.
Extreme Ownership – a hard mirror showing the weakest link usually stares back at you.
The Infinite Game – shifts the goal from beating rivals to outlasting them.
Join the Conversation
If this resonates, pull up a chair. Bring questions, skepticism, or a fresh IPA—anything but apathy. I will keep tuning the system, spinning the pedals, and hunting the next pattern worth mapping. Meet me somewhere in the feedback loop.