About

**I am updating this website, so everything is a bit disorganized right now, which is a rare occurrence according to my clients.”

 

Who am I? is a question that has many answers.

I would most likely answer it with another question: What day is it? or What time is it?

I am fortunate to have the opportunities and the ability to switch gears or jobs from day to day, with a simple mindset of helping my clients succeed and meeting their challenges, from creative services (design, print, photography, and videography) to information technology (consulting, planning, design, and support). I typically start my day by browsing through my email and messages, making sure all my clients’ technical systems are ready for the day (education, finance, legal, manufacturing, publishing, research). Once my clients are settled, I will shift gears to my creative side, where I might be involved in production planning, photo/video production, and digital design/print, or packing up gear for an off-site shoot. Occasionally, I would be in management consulting or project management for something totally unrelated.

Often, clients would find me flying under different company brands, from D-ONE to EXimages to SendToPrinting.com along with my teams and my vendors/partners.

The publishing industry isn’t foreign to me. Looking back, it was around the age of 16, when I was working in my high school's yearbook and newspaper department. At the time, I wasn’t a writer, nor have I ever become one or want to be one; rather, I focused on the technical aspect – how to make it more efficient and how to migrate from a Tandy TRS-80 to an IBM PS/2. Desktop publishing was still very manual and largely analog, and when it was time for final print production, it involved a lot of cutting and printing of text and photographs, then using rubber cement to paste them onto a layout board, making them camera-ready for the production of the printing plate.

Photography was more of a side hobby then, starting with point-and-shoot Nikon and Canon cameras and progressing to a Nikon F3, and everything in between.

During my university years, publishing and photography were nonexistent until my graduate school years, when I purchased a Power Mac 8100 series and dabbled in animation and video editing. Interestingly enough, my academic studies were not in anything close to or related to the publishing industry; instead, I focused on economics, society, human resources management, and some computer-related fields.

The Internet was established, but it did not gain widespread recognition among the general public until later. Having been the first Webmaster during my graduate studies, I entered the dot-com business for a few years, progressing from technical support to sales engineer (making the software works just like what the Sales guy sold but not necessary what it was meant to do) to system and network engineer (a little secret...I crashed a satellite-based network that linked up car dealerships in North America, or as I put it, I found the weak point of the system). Somewhere in between, I worked with IBM's AS/300 and System/32 to System/36, making them network and Internet-ready for integration. Windows PC, Mac, Linux, and anything in between all became a blur, or just a tool to do the job.

Only when I moved into the IT department of a news company did I begin to connect all the skills I had amassed. As head of IT, my job was to enable the company and its staff to develop new products and services, while ensuring my team is able to keep up with changes from migrating from a satellite-based news distribution to an IP / Internet-based distribution system, to develop and launch webcast services for the investor relations industry, in-source photo assignment/services, and support an in-house radio programming production.