HELLO, MY NAME IS _______

I've been planning on getting this blog up and going for some time, but two of my classes in my graduate program this semester provided me some extra incentive to finally get it together.

One of the assignments mirrored in both classes is to introduce myself and explain some of my reasons for taking my two classes: "New Media, Social Media, & Learning," and "Web Analytics."

Me in a nutshell: I'm from a small town in northern Nevada called Elko. I've been living in Utah for the past six years or so, and after spending two years in Brazil on an LDS mission, studied Portuguese and graduated with a degree of the same name from Brigham Young University in Provo. I got a job just before I was married in 2004 editing online high school indepenedent study courses. I got so interested in web technology, specifically rich web media, I began teaching myself web programming languages. This continued until I obtained my first full time job as a multimedia developer for the LDS Church (headquartered in Salt Lake City).

After two years at the Church, I left with a friend of mine to pursue ventures with some outside clients that had grown to a considerable size. We quickly grew to a company of four employees, and currently have five employees in our small internet publishing and multimedia firm called Sharp Media Interactive Development.

I am married to the most beautiful girl in the world, Kim. We have two children: Emmy (2) and Cohen (3 months). We currently live in Pleasant Grove.

As for the classes, I quite literally almost didn't take any classes this semester. With work being as busy as it is, I took the summer off and almost did the same in the Fall. The titles of both of these classes were too good to pass up. With Web Analytics, I heard a lecture from my professor, Clint Rogers, last year about the class topic and was really excited about it. Analytics are not a huge part of what we do, but I love the applications and implications of it and I'm ready to learn more.

As for New Media, I am really exicted about learning and sharing about the technology that is my work and my passion (if you can't already tell).

Here's to a fruitful semester (that doesn't kill me).