When I was 10, I made $50 by writing a short program to calculate optimal positions for the various lenses in a UNL Photo Systems photo package printer and enlarger. It was roughly the size of a two refrigerators, side-by-side. The first one off the assembly line was custom airbrushed in a space fantasy motif and written across the top was: “For Technical Support call Brian,” and my phone number. In hindsight, I think it was just part of a bet my dad had with his co-workers.
A year later, in 1983, dad started his own photofinishing equipment sales business with a bank loan he acquired using financial documents I forged for him. By the age of 13, I was programming and maintaining customer and vendor databases and creating product demonstration videos for a one-and-a-half-man operation generating almost $2 million in sales, annually.
I wrote a program where the user browsed items, added them to a cart, entered their shipping and payment information, and then it all was printed out so they could then trifold the sheet to expose the pre-addressed side with “Place stamp here” in the corner because this was almost a decade before the Internet.
In 1986, as an eighth grader, I was a New York State semi-finalist in the Johns Hopkins Academic Talent Search, competing against the most gifted ninth graders and ranked among the top sixteen in the state—test results comparable to the top five percentile of all college freshmen. No one made a big deal about it. I only discovered my results by accident while flipping through a pile of similar-looking test results. Almost a year later, my school’s principal handed me a certificate during a general assembly—with less excitement than he later displayed announcing the winners of ‘Best Attendance’ and ‘Most Organized Locker.’
As my dad’s business grew, my teenage bedroom became the pinnacle freelance production house of the ’80s. It even had its own dedicated fax line. I would layout brochures, fliers, and reports and edit videos on tape. On the side, I designed and produced negative overlays for photo labs; they offered the service for photographic business cards (like the one above), calendars, and prom pictures.
Highschool included video editing classes at Visual Studies Workshop and video/radio production at Eastern Monroe Career Center. I also produced a weekly live, in-studio music show on WBER and took programming classes in C, Assembly, and a couple of other languages that are no longer in common use.
My activities outside of school included performing a lead role in a touring musical pageant at 11 and the role of a Toy Soldier in the Nutcracker Suite with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and the Arizona Ballet Company at Eastman Theater when I was 17.
My hobbies were eclectic. I composed what is now known as chiptune music, moderated Q-Link message boards, attended computer users’ group meetings, occasionally manned booths at international tech expos, video-documented Masonic rituals, wrote a movie, DJed at both my school’s radio station and Backstreets, a bar I was too young to legally enter, and I designed, laid out, and wrote fake magazines—before moving on to doing the same for an actual weekly newspaper and three college-distributed publications.* I built the websites for two of them. I also dabbled in 3D animation and created fliers, postcards, posters, and merch for bands.
Some teachers called me lazy.
Since 1998, I have been handling print ads, photography, digital touch-ups, full-stack web design and development, SEO and PPC ad management, and business consulting. For a bit, I was the online editor of a couple newspapers that have been publishing for 40 and 130 years. For almost ten years, I was a stagehand and an audio visual artist for events and concerts — house parties to stadiums.
* There were a couple months in 1998 when my name appeared in the masthead for publications with names like: Motion Magazine, Gracies Dinnertime Theatre, Cereal Magazine, and Cabbages and Kings. I only wrote a couple articles for the Monroe Doctrine, but that was around that time.