As a child, Tim was more interested in gadgets than sports. His idea of a good time was setting up his dad’s old mercury vapor tube ham radio transmitter in a closet with a colored light, and his mom’s pedal-controlled electric sewing machine on the floor. He would lock himself in there for hours, and pretend he was piloting a spaceship.

His dad was a radio broadcaster (see: http://www.swing-thing.com) and Tim helped build a family radio station in southern California in the 70’s. Tim began his radio career at age 6 on his dad’s live broadcasts. He eventually got a class 1 FCC radio ticket and worked as assistant chief engineer and broadcaster.

At age 25, Tim began working for oil companies (before he became eco-conscious, of course) as a navigator on research ships all over the world. During his eight years as a navigator (which is also called a hydrographic research survey consultant), he wrote navigation programs in Basic that were sometimes used industry-wide and trained other navigators.

In the 90’s he took on learning the Web including HTML and various scripting languages such as perl and javascript. In the process, he discovered FileMaker (version 2) and has had a love affair with it ever since. For 12 years he has written custom shopping carts and data-driven websites. He also built several large-scale FileMaker systems that are still in use today (see http://filemaker.com/solutions/customers/stories/2032.html).

In addition to his technical experience, he studied music composition at California Institute of the Arts and worked as a paramedic and anesthesia technician. But he insists he has always been a nerd, first and foremost.