About Me

Yours Truly

The only
–true wisdom–
is knowing you know nothing.

Yes, I claim to be a rennassance man. Some people think that means people like me cannot make up our minds about who and what we will be when we grow up.

Some people even think men like me never grow up as we’re always into one thing after another; we’re born curious, they settle, we wander through the awesome experience of our tangible world becoming involved with one thing after another, they prefer becoming spectators.

Dan Piraro knows me well…

Image of scanned Bizarro cartoon

I was born in the shadow of the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet on the naval base in San Diego, California in December 1952. As the first born I was raised living on and off the USMC base at Camp Pendleton. Daddy was a lifer. My playground was the Santa Margarita Mountains.

Picture of the Santa Margarita Mountains. San Diego County, California USA
Santa Margarita Mountains. San Diego County, California USA

I learned what firing the big guns sounded and felt like at an early age while living on that military base. For a short period of time we also lived off the base on the outskirts of the Mohave Desert in a place called Comanche Cove that is not even on the map.

I had a pet lizard until my mother found out. I learned what it was like to stand barefoot in the hot sand of the desert; feet so hot they never felt a hoard of red ants trying to climb up my leg.

The awesome crystal clear cold desert night sky was (is) filled with millions of twinkling stars. The word heaven comes to mind.

We moved back to Milwaukee in 1962 where both sides of Sicilian and Irish immigrant families had settled. I had to become a city boy. I haven’t seen heaven since.

Picture of heavenly desert night sky
Heavenly desert night sky.

To make a story much shorter, after becoming degreed and working as an architect here in Wisconsin I find myself fat and happy doing my best work in solitude as a WWW designer and developer.

I have also become  a design-builder for tapABILITIES, LLC , a State of Wisconsin startup as a member of a cadre of other like-minded men and women with extraordinary creative and technical skills who have discovered the world of creating new or modified tangible things surface mounted or impermeably embedded with Near Field Communication (NFC) Integrated Circuits (IC.)

With the simple (((tap)))® of a cellphone a programmatic instruction is encoded into the memory of the IC that is instantaneously submitted to a server on the Internet. The response is returned to the display of the cellphone.

No App. Just (((tap)))®

Picture of supported options that can be encoded to the memory of a Near Field Communication tag (NFC)
Supported options that can be encoded into the memory of a Near Field Communication tag (NFC)

cad·re

/'kadrē, 'kädrē, 'käd, rā/
  •  a small group of talented people skilled in a particular purpose or profession.
  •  a cadre of designers and builders of artistic and functional objects.
  •  a cadre of designers and developers of software and services.

synonyms: team

  •  a group of dedicated hard core specialists.
  •  members of a collaborative team pursuing an objective.

I’ve developed a mantra of sorts.

TAKE ACTION