COMPTIA A+ and Network+
I’ve been a ‘computer geek’ for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories involve watching my father type in these long lines of code on a TI-99/4A Texas Instruments console/cartridge computer to get a game to run for me. When we got an Atari 1040Ste 8-bit Desktop PC a few years later he immediately encouraged me to learn how to take it apart and put it back together and I was hooked.
I graduated High School in 2001 and unfortunately when I left for college 9/11 occurred. I was born and raised in New York City, Manhattan, and heard of an entry level IT position at a small private medical clinic that was offering free medical and psychological services to Ground Zero workers and after securing the position I decided not to return to college after my first year, and I’ve been working in IT ever since.
April 3rd, 2023
It’s great working with a team that is so immediately warm and friendly while also being highly engaged and dedicated to delivering an essential service to local businesses. I’m proud that Databranch can offer the extensive expertise that the team brings, combined with the enterprise quality of tools available to us, as engineers, that we are then able to offer to you as a customer.
I’m a Field Engineer operating primarily in Chemung County (Elmira/Corning) and the Ithaca area.
I love maps and geography so anything to do with maps, GPS, or satellite imaging I’m always looking for ways to utilize in my personal life. I’ve spent more time than one should just looking at Google Earth, my family and I are avid ‘GeoCachers’ which is a ‘game’ that combines GPS and treasure hunts, and although I’m a poor digital artist I attempt to make ‘fantasy’ maps and atlases.
I’m also very interested in the emergence of Predictive Language Models/Large Language Models, or what is being referred to as ‘AI’. I’m currently working on getting an instance of Stanford University’s Alpaca AI running on my homelab and learning how to set up web-crawlers to parse HTML from websites and output data that can be used to create custom datasets for model training.
Our family has 3 custom built Desktop PCs (1xWin11, 1xWin10, 1xUbuntu/Linux) and 3 Laptops (Lenovo YOGA 720, HP 15T-DY200, and a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5). I also have an extensive ‘homelab’ setup; A Microtik RB750Gr3 hEX Router, a Cisco Catalyst 3750G-48PS GbE/PoE Switch, a Dell R710 Server running ProxMox Virtualization Environment, a QNAP TS-431 NAS, and 3 Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pro WiFi APs.
Geocaching, Hiking, Camping, Kayaking, D&D, Reading, Gaming and anything Technology/Gadget related.
My girlfriend Emily and I have three wonderful children; our boys are Evan and Lukas who are 14 and 9, and our daughter Shaylah is almost 5.
We have three pets. Our all-black Scottish Terrier is ‘Miss Molly Dog Kirsch’, and our two cats are ‘Muffin M&M Marshmellow’ and Oreo. (Muffin is significantly larger than Oreo and according to the children that demanded a more complex name like the dog.)
