We all had dreams and aspirations as kids. We all wanted to do something with our lives and I have a feeling most of us didn’t fulfill those dreams. I had a close friend who told me she wanted to be an aerospace engineer and, at the time, she was early in high school and today, she’s doing it and living that dream. it took a lot of hard work but she accomplished that dream. There’s nothing wrong with not achieving those dreams. The only constant in our lives and in the universe is change and evolving with this change is the only way to stay afloat. While it’s on my mind, I wanted to post what I wanted to be and put some life goals in place. Maybe I can actually do these one day. Who knows?<\/p>\n
My job choice changed over the years. At a very young age my dream was to be a fireman. Fighting fires and saving lives but that ended around the age of 12 when I suddenly decided that I wanted to be an astronaut. I was dead set on going to space camp and it took about 2 years to realize that my math and science skills just weren’t there so blasting off into space wasn’t going to happen without a ton of hard work. Of course, you’re a kid and hard work is synonymous with getting up early on Saturday. It’s the last thing you want to do.<\/p>\n
My plan until I was around 14 was that I was going to graduate high school and go into the air force and then go to college on the air force payroll and hopefully transition into NASA by the time I was 26. In retrospect, my odds weren’t very good of making it all of the way considering my academic performance and since 9\/11\/2001, I would be fighting a war so avoiding the armed forces was probably a good idea.<\/p>\n
Throughout all of my aspirations. Fireman, Astronaut, Scientist and even professional surfer there has been one thing in my mind since I was young and it’s the one thing that keeps calling me back no matter how far away from it I get but I’ll go into that in a second.<\/p>\n
When I was 12, we bought our first computer. A 66MHz Pentium I PC from Hewlett Packard. It booted up to Windows 3.1 and had a 512 megabyte hard drive. I signed on by the minute to\u00a0 AOL 2.0 and learned the world of the web. It didn’t take long for me to take the computer apart and buy books to help put it back together. At the age of 13, I met a man named George Waters and he gave me a couple of computers. One of those was a system running Red Hat Linux and the other was a Macintosh LC III. Both of them had some random cards and some old software. He also gave me some books and I started working on computers. In 2001, I saved up and purchased an Apple iBook. I was a freshman in high school. I ended up working for George for 3 years (19-21 yrs of age). The rest is history.<\/p>\n
My fathers on both sides, both my biological and my dad since the age of two have a history in law enforcement. My biological father heads up investigative teams in Florida for the Highway Patrol. He’s been there since just after I was born so that’s 20 years on the force. Not bad. The man I call Dad who my Mom married when I was two was a police officer and paramedic. He began teaching me martial arts when I was 2 and he continues teaching others and has a dojo in Florida. I’ve been training with him for 20 years and only recently took a break when I moved to San Francisco for work.<\/p>\n
Dad’s training has always had a focus on self-defense. I’ve trained in boxing, wrestling, what you might call mixed martial arts and a slew of traditional Japanese martial arts. The past 7 years, we have focused on Aikido. The experience has been very rewarding. Many times I’ve had the opportunity of working doorman with Dad at bars and he has had the chance to teach defensive tactics to local and national law enforcement. His prior police experience paired with his martial arts experience has helped my training but made him an excellent candidate for teaching law enforcement. Here’s a video I just made for him and uploaded for the launch of his new website.<\/p>\n