I learn by building, testing, breaking, questioning and trying again. Sometimes the experiment is a network. Sometimes it's a car, a house, a recipe—or me.
THE PROCESS
The subject changes. The process doesn't.
I don't only want to read about how something works. I want to touch it, test it, understand what happens when it fails and see whether I can make it better.
GET CURIOUS→TRY IT→BREAK SOMETHING→LEARN WHY→TRY AGAIN
TECHNOLOGY · HOME LAB
I wanted to understand the network, so I built one.
While working at Lion/Hyde, I wanted to understand networking beyond the systems I encountered at work. I built a lab at home to work through switching, VLANs, trunking, routing and Wi-Fi.
Eventually the lab became infrastructure: I improved my own home network, and the hands-on understanding traveled back into my professional work—informing infrastructure I later designed or improved for schools and other clients.
AUTOMOTIVE
Getting the Buick back.
Keeping an older car alive became its own education in diagnosis. Work included catalytic converters, the body control module, blend-door actuators and the systems behind heating and air conditioning.
The reward wasn't simply replacing parts. It was understanding enough of the system to keep working the problem until the car—and eventually the heat and A/C—worked again.
HOME · RENOVATION
The house is allowed to teach me too.
Renovation and repair projects turn ordinary parts of homeownership into opportunities to understand materials, electrical and mechanical systems, planning, tools and the difference between what looks simple and what actually is.
This collection will document projects, mistakes, fixes and the things I'd do differently next time.
EVIDENCE OF THE LIFE
The work leaves a record.
Not everything I learn begins at a desk. Sometimes the record is a photograph of an afternoon fishing. Sometimes it's bread rising in the oven. These are not decorations around the archive. They are part of it.
OUTDOORS · FISHINGCOOKING · MAKING
THE LAB KEEPS EXPANDING
COOKING
Technique you can taste.
Recipes, experiments, mistakes and the meals that finally worked.
OUTDOORS
Fishing, water & whatever comes next.
Time outside is part recreation, part observation and part reset.
COMMUNICATION
Learning to speak, present and connect.
Writing, Toastmasters and the continuing work of making an idea clear to another person.
PERSONAL CHALLENGES
Sometimes I'm the experiment.
Learning about discipline, health, habits and myself by actually doing the work.
PROJECT JOURNAL
The videos are part of the record.
I have filmed projects for years—repairing, building, cooking, experimenting and figuring things out as I went. I don't think of those as generic vlogs. They are project documentation: evidence of what I tried, what worked, what failed and what I learned.
As the archive grows, videos can live with the projects they document instead of being separated from the work that gave them meaning.
THE LAB IS ME
I don't need to master something before I'm allowed to begin.
I begin because I want to understand it. Mastery—if it comes—is built somewhere in the repetitions.
