I'm a UX designer/developer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I worked for many years as a consultant until I decided to get out from behind the cubicle walls and see more of the world.

My travels spanned little over a year, during which time I spent three months on the island of Roatan in Honduras, diving with the great people at Coconut Tree Divers and immersing myself in the island culture. Coming from a developed nation it was quite the shocking experience at first, but after a couple of weeks of unwinding and enjoying the natural beauty both above and below the surface, not to mention the multitude of people met, my initial aversion to the quality of life subsided and I was able to take in much more of my surroundings, an experience I would have never garnered had I been a cruise ship gawker or a weeklong visitor as I had been before in many other places. The weeklong guy, never a cruisy.

If there is one thing a love about diving, it's the social aspect surrounding the activity. So many stories about far away places left me wanting for more, so I decided to leave Roatan as my Honduran visa expired and headed off to Asia, visiting Tokyo and later Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. I'd already been to Southeast Asia aboard the USS Enterprise during my service with the Marines, but actually staying in one country for a month was whole different experience than just visiting for a couple of days, trying to cram all the touristy things you can do in a few hours.

By luck or chance, I was able to dive Sipadan for a day, far eclipsing all of my other dives combined. On St. Patrick's Day, no less. A three-hour flight coupled with an hour bus and two hours on a boat to make three dives, only to leave the next day may be extreme to some, but if you're ever in the neighborhood you have to dive Sipadan. Also on my trip through Southeast Asia I was able to dive Koh Tao, Koh Phi Phi and Hin Daeng in Thailand, the Subic Bay wrecks in the Philippines, Komodo National Park and the Gili Islands in Indonesia. Take my advice and fly AirAsia, by far and large the best economy carrier.

Growing up in Spain, I'd heard many stories about the Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James) and it had been one of my dreams to complete it. I had been training for it while still working in Boston, but the only way to get ready to walk eight hours a day is to walk eight hours a day. Plus, I had it in mind to finish the entire walk in two weeks. In hindsight, that was probably the most optimistic, not to mention the stupidest timetable I thought possible. In the end, I completed 454 miles in 23 walking days from Irun to Santiago de Compostella. That's not even 20 miles a day, and I have to mention that I had to do the walk in three separate spurts, each with at least a week in between. I never took into consideration what eight hours of continuous friction on hot pavement can do to the soles of my feet. But then again, I'd never trade the experience in for anything.

But back to reality. Aside from eating and traveling, social networking is my passion and I'm currently working on mashing up photos and video with tribal knowledge on a project called Smoelt, trying to work in all of the travel experience with digital curation. I rediscovered Twitter, which was an application that I failed to understand even while working on a similar project, Wis.dm, back in 2007.

My tools of the trade are HTML, CSS and Javascript, but these days you'll find me working with Ruby, JQuery, LESS, SASS and HAML. Rails is great, but sometimes all you need is Sinatra, which is rapidly becoming my favorite tool. Heroku is my hosting platform of choice, backed by CloudFront and S3, but I should be paying more attention to MongoHQ. After many years of Windows and a couple with Ubuntu, I switched to the Mac OS platform just so I could work forever with TextMate. Yes, the hypnowheel is extremely annoying, but the toolset is worth the occasional interuption.

Aside from social networking, my current interest are usability mechanics, digital curation, chai, the whole cloud thing and Fibonacci numbers, but my biggest claim to fame is a credit on Flight Unlimited III.