Designed and assembled in the USA
I was born in southern California, but I left when I was three years old and spent the next three years living in Saudi Arabia. After that, I grew up mostly in Washington State — basically everywhere except Seattle.
I joined the US Navy right after graduating from high school and spent two years in the naval nuclear propulsion training pipeline. This included a year of classroom training in Orlando, Florida, where I learned electrical theory, nuclear physics, materials science, and radiological health physics. I then had a year of practical training at a land-based operational nuclear power plant in upstate New York. Following completion of my training, I was assigned to the Reactor Electrical Department of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier based in Bremerton, Washington.
After leaving the Navy, I spent a couple of years working as a radiological health physics technician. Shortly following a Technetium-99 contamination incident in St Louis, Missouri, which involved me having to wear rubber gloves on my hands for two weeks so I wouldn’t spread radioactivity everywhere, I decided to bow out of this industry and return to university.
I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English (summa cum laude) from Kent State University in 2007 and spent the following year working for PR Newswire in Cleveland, Ohio.
Exported to New Zealand
I moved to New Zealand in 2008 and spent the next five years living in Palmerston North.
During my time in “Palmy”, I earned a Master of Arts in English from Massey University. I also began writing for The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), a now-defunct blog that posted daily news items, rumour analysis, and how-to articles about Apple’s devices, software, and Apple itself. At its height, TUAW had a daily readership in the millions, but its parent company shut the site down in 2015.
In 2013, I gained permanent residency in New Zealand and moved to Ōhope Beach in the Bay of Plenty.
From 2013 to 2018, I was the Web Administrator and Designer for Whakatāne District Council, the local government entity providing services to the area’s ~40,000 residents. I did ground-up redesigns of all three Council-owned websites in 2013 and 2014, and I completely rebuilt the Council’s intranet in 2015.
Prior to my redesign of whakatane.govt.nz, the website was ranked at 25th of 78 NZ local government websites by the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM). In the first year after the 2013 redesign, the website climbed to third place. From 2015 through 2018, whakatane.govt.nz was the top-ranked local government website in the country.
Read more about the Whakatāne District Council website redevelopment project
I moved to Wellington in 2018 and briefly worked as a Senior Web Designer at the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). After a few months at MSD, I accepted a standing offer to work remotely for a Whakatāne-based web hosting agency. I left six months later, after completing several website projects for charitable foundations and small businesses.
After that, I completed a three-month contract working for the internal communications department at the Department of Conservation.
In early 2020, I was brought on to the Web Team at the Ministry of Health to assist with New Zealand’s COVID-19 pandemic response. For the next three years, I had primary responsibility for the accuracy and daily updating of the website’s COVID-19 case data, vaccination data, and other information of vital importance to the public understanding of New Zealand’s response to COVID-19.
I moved to the rural outskirts of the South Wairarapa in 2021, where I currently reside with my partner, our cat, our nearly 15-year-old dog, three motorcycles, an ocean view, and Starlink satellite internet.
I bought an Apple Watch Ultra in 2022 and have subsequently developed an obsession with titanium dive watches, though I do not currently own any (besides the Ultra itself).
In my somewhat copious free time, I write, lift weights, ride motorcycles, play guitar (poorly), and fight a never-ending battle against Mother Nature to stop my house from falling down around my ears. I also do my best to keep on top of tech trends so that 20 years from now I don’t end up being the kind of person who needs a teenager to show him how to turn on his TV.
About this website
I built Rawson NZ using WordPress, with theming enabled by Customify and page design done via the Elementor plugin. I absolutely could have built this all from scratch using Drupal and SCSS, but I got the results I wanted much more quickly by using off-the-shelf tools.
The website’s default “light mode” colour palette uses the colours of Indian’s 2022 FTR R Carbon motorcycle as inspiration. Rawson NZ also automatically supports your device’s “dark mode” settings if it has them and auto-generates a darker theme. You can toggle between light and dark mode settings manually via the button at the bottom of the screen.
Since I can’t draw to save my life, I created the website’s logo using Stable Diffusion with the prompt, “Line art drawing of a man riding an Indian FTR motorcycle left to right”. The end result looks way more like an Indian Scout (and the AI had it going from right to left), but after some tweaking in Pixelmator I’m pretty okay with it.
I have made an effort to make this website’s content as accessible as possible (no “click here” links, ALT tags on all images, proper heading structure). If you are still experiencing accessibility-related problems with this website, please contact me about the specific issue, because website accessibility is important to me.
While I designed and built this site on desktop, it’s absolutely my intention that it should behave and perform just as well on mobile devices. If the site looks or runs like a dumpster fire on your phone, please let me know so I can fix whatever’s broken.
