About Me

I'm a proud Canadian from Vancouver who currently lives in Marina del Rey, California. The worst part? No Tim Hortons.

If I had to describe what I like to do it would be: "Build cool things". I spend much of my free time using Houdini and attempting to building new and interesting tools. I try to take things to the next level and find new and creative uses for existing technology. Sometimes even I crash and burn or have to ask for help.

I am a former Technical Director and Product Specialist at Side Effects Software in Toronto. While there I spent most of my time building tools using Python and Digital Assets. I've been using HOM to build scripts and tools since pre-alpha 9.0 days so you could say I probably know what I'm doing. I'm always willing to help out and answer questions. I was very fortunate to work with the most amazing and talented group of developers anywhere. Lucky for them I still bother them all the time on IM.

I operate the site www.houdinitoolbox.com. It is a site where I can post all my personally created tools and educational material for Houdini. It's always been my goal to be able to publish all the cool stuff I've created so everyone can use, learn from it or improve it.

I'm always more than happy to give advice, consult, provide examples or thoughts with regards to scripting, asset and tool building, or anything else Houdini related. I welcome your tool requests and suggestions. If you have an idea of something you think might be awesome but might not be able to build yourself please let me know and I'll see what I can do. I definitely don't have all the good ideas.

Captain Hammy is a fictitious character based on me, but not really. He was named Hammy, after my nickname, but that's a different story. He was created in elementary school in 1998 by my friend Jeremy Neufeld.

Captain Hammy first appeared in a small series of comics drawn on some loose leaf binder paper while we were in grade 7. He was the captain of a pirate ship, the USS Hammy, and went around plundering and doing other pirate nonsense. I really can't remember much else other than he was pretty awesome and I think he was boozer. Sadly, I lost all the comics long ago. The important thing was he was a stick man with a pirate hat, sword, and eye patch. Truly a masterpiece.

After his adventures on the high seas, the Captain was next to appear in the new fangled world of online gaming. Specifically, games in the MechWarrior series. He floated around online for several years before retiring to an island in the tropics.

These days, he spends most of his days being low-key as my AIM and GTalk usernames, waiting for that moment to commandeer himself a new pirate ship and get back to sailing the seas.

The majority of this is site was created by hand using VIM. It is written to conform to the latest web standards and is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. It makes use of PHP, MySQL, and Javascript for page generation.

If you have trouble viewing things then your browser is most likely older. This site is best viewed using the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. Internet Explorer should be fine but it might have a couple issues displaying random elements. If you still have problems viewing the site please send an email with your web browser version and operating system. A screenshot also is helpful.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please feel free to let me know.