About Chris

My Professional Journey

I'm currently the Lead Systems Engineer at Northern Tool + Equipment, hauling 25+ years of hard-won IT experience into work every day. Getting here, however, was less a straight career path and more a choose-your-own-adventure novel with some genuinely unexpected chapters.

It all started with four years in the U.S. Navy as an Interior Communications Electrician (IC2). (No, I did not fix radios. People always think that.) After my service, I dove into IT as a humble desktop support technician at Northrop Grumman in St. Augustine, FL - the kind of role where you spend more time explaining the difference between the internet and Internet Explorer than you do actually fixing things.

One year of contract work later, I leveled up to Administrator at Winn-Dixie Stores in Jacksonville, FL, where I cut my teeth on Microsoft Virtual Server - the spiritual predecessor to Hyper-V, for the historians in the room.

From there, I transitioned into an Engineer role at Kemper Insurance, where I actually got to do proper engineering work - which was refreshing. After six great years, and the birth of my first son, my wife and I packed up and moved from Jacksonville to the Twin Cities to be closer to family. That's when I landed at Cargill - one of the largest private companies you've probably never heard of. (Seriously, Google them. They have their hands in everything. Everything.) At Cargill, I took a deliberate detour from engineering into Project Management and Lifecycle Analysis - a whole new adventure that turned out to be more valuable than I expected.

In 2014, I pivoted again - joining Dell as a Master ProSupport Engineer, helping build out a brand-new SST team in Eden Prairie, MN in support of their Compellent acquisition. Three years of large-enterprise life later, burnout knocked on my door, so I took a blind leap into small business IT. That's where I quickly learned what "wearing all the hats" truly means. (Spoiler: it means wearing all of the hats. Simultaneously. On fire.) It was an overwhelming, formative, occasionally terrifying chapter - and ultimately the one that brought me to where I am today.

For the past several years, I've been in my current role, and I genuinely love it. Complexity doesn't scare me - it's kind of the point.

What's in the Toolkit

And if I had to pick a favorite? Virtualization. It's where infrastructure gets interesting - abstracting hardware, maximizing resources, building environments that flex. That's my bread and butter, and honestly most of the condiments too. Everything else on that list feeds into it one way or another.

Some Personal Details

I was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to parents who both served in the U.S. Air Force. My early childhood was spent in Wabasha, MN - yes, the very hometown of Grumpy Old Men, a fact I bring up at every available opportunity - before my family relocated closer to the Twin Cities around age five. That's where I spent the rest of my formative years, developing my love of technology and, eventually, a very strong opinion about proper cable management.

At 22, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy and spent four years aboard the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) during the post-9/11 era. It was a defining experience that gave me discipline, perspective, and an enduring appreciation for hot food. After my service, I settled in Jacksonville, FL for about 14 years before completing what I like to call the Great Midwestern Migration - moving back to the Twin Cities metro area in 2012.

These days I'm married with two boys who are an endless source of energy, laughter, and completely inexplicable messes. When I'm not at work or buried in some new project, I enjoy writing, spending time outdoors, tackling DIY builds, and just having fun with my kids.

I'm also the owner and administrator of usmilitarygamers.com, an online community for military veterans. The goal is to foster camaraderie through gaming while creating a space for open conversation about the unique challenges veterans face. The website has had its quieter seasons, but the Discord community is still active and going strong - and that's what matters most.

Hosting Details

If you've ever wondered what keeps this little corner of the internet running - it's MDDHosting, and I genuinely have nothing but good things to say about them. For someone who has been around the web hosting block more than a few times, that kind of consistency earns real loyalty.

I've been with MDDHosting for over 15 years at this point - long enough to have very real opinions: performance is solid, support knows their stuff and actually engages with the problem, and things just... work. The kind of hosting that you forget about because it never gives you a reason to remember it - which is exactly what hosting should be. When someone stays a customer that long, you know the service must be good. I should get a medal 🥇 for loyalty - or maybe they should get a medal 🏅 for keeping me around. (and you get a medal - Hell, we all get medals. 🎖️🎖️🎖️)

This site, along with several other projects I run, all call MDDHosting home. At this point I have enough sites parked there that I've officially crossed from "customer" into "person who has opinions at the dinner table about shared vs. reseller hosting plans."

MDDHosting offers a refer-a-friend program for existing customers - if you sign up through my affiliate link and stick around for at least 30 days, I get a $25 account credit with no minimum threshold to redeem it. Simple, clean, and appreciated. (Every little bit helps keep the lights on around here.)

So if you're in the market for web hosting and want to help offset my server costs while doing it - I'd genuinely appreciate it:

Check out MDDHosting

Heads up: that's a referral link. If you sign up, I get a hosting credit. I'm mentioning this upfront because I think disclosure matters - but I'd be saying the same things about them either way.