All of my life I have loved to tinker!
When I was 14-15 I used money I made painting houses with my uncles to build my own computer. I spent a few years tinkering with that until I left on an LDS mission. While on my mission I got the opportunity to learn to take my bike apart and maintaining it.
After I got home I soon bought a car and was able to learn more about how to take care of it. I had always wanted to learn more about them but in high school I drove a vehicle that was technically my parents. The most I did with it was replace the timing belt and tensioner that broke while I had it. Some people might think that is quite the undertaking but I wanted to learn more. However, before I got to work much on the car it was totaled when I was rear-ended sitting at a red light. Honestly it turned out to be a blessing but I haven't stopped tinkering with my car, my wife can attest to that.
While doing Air Force ROTC, college, and a 30-40 hour a week job I was getting burnt out and needed a hobby that I could use to unwind. I decided to get into leather working. That was interesting but short lived because it can get expensive really fast! I think that this is a hobby that I may come back to one day.
A new hobby came along due to changes at work. I was working at a call center and had just returned from a 6 week study abroad in China and I was not liking being on the phones so I applied for a job in the quality department. I had always done fairly well in my quality scores and so I got the job. As I learned the new job my mind naturally looked at things I could do to help and improve whatever I was doing. This gave me a creative outlet. Soon I was working more and more with Excel and analytics. I wound up in a position that would unknowingly set me up to keep on learning. I got to be the sole person creating reports and data collection systems to help pass on quality information to managers. This was part of the companies growing phases that would wind up making my position obsolete as the company grew and changed.
I was so interwoven into the system that in order to make the transition management needed to learn what functions I had been performing and assess what they wanted to keep and what to get rid of. During this process much of my daily tasks were halted, can you say boring! I began to look for ways that I could help in the company and got to meet some of the coolest people I have had the opportunity to know, work force management. The small team that was work force management was a tight knit team of smart people that had a lot to learn from.
I got to meet them a little and interacted with them more and more as I learned Access and helped out with tasks they were doing. Soon I was making tools to link different departments using Access and learning VBA and Visual Basic. Which sparked my most recent interest, electronics.
I have had the opportunity to take apart some old electronics and tinker with different things to make random projects. The most interesting has probably been my musical Christmas lights. I even did an Instructable on it.
My wife has been doing a bit of blogging for a while and it has got me interested in html, CSS, and javascript. So I decided that I would start a blog. The name of my blog is based upon some ideas thrown around for an aftershave that I have decided to make for myself, which I might sell. I have decided to use this site for my family mostly at first, but with the option to expand.
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