IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional •
IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional •
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With solutions for system administration, security compliance, networking, and data management, I am a no-nonsense technician focused on efficiency, simplicity, and sharing my knowledge.
I offer in-person and remote support for troubleshooting and configuring hardware and software. I can provide solutions for fast and reliable file sharing across Windows, Mac, and network storage devices. I help meet industry-specific security compliance requirements through policy implementation, enforcement, and auditing. I also provide data loss prevention/recovery services. Additionally, I can deploy, maintain, and monitor workstations, servers, networking appliances, and other business infrastructure products.
I am currently working as the PC Tech Department Team Lead at an IT company in Atlanta. I hold an active CompTIA A+ certification. I originally graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the University of North Florida. I have also completed several continuing education courses through Emory University.
Paragraph in progress about what I currently do for work.
1) iSeries desktops / other desktops
2) iSeries micro PCs / other micro PCs
3) Bulk hard drive and SSD wiping and other drive cage topics
4) Laptop wiping, registration, and rules for notetaking
5) PXE OS installs and USB installs, failed installs, RAID on or AHCI
6) Autopilot checks, Powershell, Absolute Persistence/Computrace, BIOS locks
7) Server testing, value checking, and notetaking rules
8) Procedures for creating for-repair, cosmetic, and ebay laptop testing labels
9) Motherboard testing
10) Apple computers and other non-standard/special items for testing
11) Scrapping policies
12) Wholesale finishing prepwork
13) Other general topics: asset tags, wipe stations, tools, printers, photo-taking for form completion, power adapters, presorting.
Pallets of iseries, laptops, vintage (iMac G3), servers, micro PCs. Value checking. Bulk hard drive wipes. Battery, screen, keyboard, trackpad, wifi, ssd/hdd, RAM. Studying for Network + Diagnostics and benchmarks. Now supervising a small team of other PC Techs. documentation reviews, and interviews. Carefully protecting any customer data. Protecting data in locked zones. Carefully tracking customers.
What others say about me:
“Andy is able to work within our budget. That is one thing that Andy is good at: being able to take whatever your budget is, whether it is small or large, and work within your means.”
“He does things very quickly and efficiently.”
“When Andy says he is going to follow through and meet deadlines, he does that, and he communicates. He keeps us in the loop on how things are proceeding.”
— Jimmy Orth
“Andy is an extremely talented and hard-working..."
"Throughout my time working with him for over 4 years, he was also an amazing leader and mentor."
"He always knew how to solve any problem, whether it was something technical or creative."
"He has a great work ethic and is very proactive and persistent when taking on projects.”
— Travis Misarti
“Professional in every aspect.”
— Scott Reneau
“[Andy has] an attitude to be collaborative and to meet the needs of the client.”
— Dr. Nicholas Serenati
My life with computers from the beginning:
I’ve been around computers my whole life, including when I was very young. The first killer app for me was Paint on Windows 3.1. I learned to type in grade school, and I first explored the internet on a dial-up connection at my local library. Exploring computers, discovering new applications, and learning how to use them was very fun. A perfect example of this was discovering Windows Movie Maker. I first discovered this application preinstalled on Windows XP on my Pentium III Gateway 2000 PC. The potential of this program blew me away. It is hilarious now to think back on the limited power I was using. The first video I created had a tiny resolution and was 11 minutes long, but unbelievably, it took 13 hours to render on a Pentium III. I only had a 20GB hard drive at the time, so I had the free space to store only that one rendered video before my drive was full.
A year or two later, I would get my hands on more powerful computers, starting with a Pentium 4 Dell Optiplex. Around this time, my parents would get our house a broadband internet connection. I began to code websites at this time, using Microsoft FrontPage and later Adobe Dreamweaver. Then, in 2005 or ‘06, my parents bought me a Pentium D HP Pavilion. This was way more powerful than the Pentium 4 and was fully capable of editing full standard-definition video resolutions. This marked the jump from using IDE drives to SATA. This would be my first foray into upgrading PCs, ultimately needing dual graphics cards and 4TB of storage, a good amount of hardware for a young consumer to have at the time.
2007 was the beginning of my journey with Apple which dominated the world of video during the late 2000s back when Final Cut Pro had a huge user base. The first Apple machine I could call my own was a MacBook Pro 17” with a Core 2 Duo. I kept this laptop for 6 years and experienced dangerously inflated lithium batteries three different times. This was my main machine for both studying and doing freelance work while earning an undergrad. With this laptop, I began to produce professional level media for the first time. I would begin to learn Photoshop. And this is also where I learned more about computers such as creating a dual-booting-system for the first time, OSX and Windows Vista. I would also clone boot drives onto externals and boot them up over FireWire. I needed a substantial amount of storage (at the time) for my projects, 16TB total. Through purchasing these hard drives, I would begin to learn about RAID configurations.
The next big leap was creating a custom PC build for the first time with the help of my brother-in-law. He showed me all the parts I needed and how to buy used parts without getting ripped off. This solidified my love for computer tinkering and problem-solving. I built this system as a Hackintosh PC. The CPU was an i7-3770K and used a Gigabyte motherboard. The best part was that I deshelled multiple of my matching external HDDs and created an eight-drive RAID 10 configuration with a RocketRAID card. I experienced two different 2 bad motherboards during the course of using this machine. This was quite the learning experience and tested my backup habits. I started with a GeForce GTX 660TI. Later, my brother-in-law gave me a GTX 980 as a gift, and the additional CUDA cores and VRAM made my editing software faster and much more stable. I also began Linux distro hopping for the first time with this machine, starting with Linux Mint and Ubuntu.
When I began working in the video industry in Atlanta, I would end up overseeing over 15 iMacs and other PCs, NASes, and servers. The experience of managing so many computers and staff taught me a lot about data management and how fast situations can get out of hand, and data gets lost when a strong policy of where exactly to save files is not in place. I had to manage a large amount of data during this time, and for cost reasons, we began archiving footage onto LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes. In total, I have helped oversee roughly 1PB of video footage across the years.
I continued to work on custom builds during this era of my career, such as one with an i9-9900K and an AMD Vega 64 card, all still compatible with Hackintoshing right before Apple made the shift to the M1 processor. Additionally, during these years, I would gain a lot more exposure to Linux. I began to tinker with CentOS, Kali Linux, and Parrot OS. I also got to practice a lot on TrueNAS Core (based on FreeBSD) and QTS, the operating system of QNAP NASes.
In 2019 I was asked to audit the IT security of the company I worked for to meet the requirements of being a Disney vendor. Completing the required paperwork and speaking with consultants brought me a lot of understanding of what it takes to be cyber-secure. Investment, intentional policy making, relentless monitoring and enforcement, and a deep understanding of the technology deployed in a production environment are all critical to security.
Work in progress
I ended up signing an NDA towards the end of my video editing work, and that is where that part of the story ends because it was then I made the switch to I.T.
My current personal machine is an M1 MacBook Air absolute bang for the buck. First ARM processor. Asahi Linux (fork of Fedora). This laptop provided all I needed to transition out of video and into IT. It has been powerful enough to do everything I’ve needed now for years
PC troubleshooting Test to get job. At my workplace now I use a Dell Precision desktop .
What I enjoy outside computing
I love distance running, road biking, and CrossFit. Also, I like to travel the world with my wife. The furthest away I’ve been to date is India, where I attended an Indian wedding with my relatives in New Delhi. Other notable places include Germany and Austria, where my cousins got married. I’ve also visited France, Italy, Canada, and many cities in the U.S.
Before working in the IT field, I spent over ten years working in video post-production. I switched paths because I saw a need for talented and knowledgeable computer problem-solvers. While working in video, I would regularly troubleshoot machines and engineer strategies for dealing with massive footage libraries hundreds of terabytes in size. Advanced IT skills were the critical factor for reliable and efficient operations, and this realization led me to my new career path.
If you would like to see some of my old video work, click here to jump to a different page.
