About me

I pronounce my last name “SER-nick.” I’m a 50-year-old Web developer living with my wonderful wife Amy in Racine, Wisconsin — about 60 miles north of Chicago, where I was born, and 25 miles south of Milwaukee. Most of my life was spent just south of here in Kenosha. My mom still lives there, and three of my sisters also reside in the area, with another now living in Ohio. My dad died in 1980.

Work

I design, redesign and maintain websites, primarily for small businesses in the Racine and Kenosha area, the greater Chicago-Milwaukee corridor, and beyond.

I have been engrossed by media all my life — writing, photos, illustrations, audio, video, and computers — so I was very excited when the World Wide Web combined all this into one brilliant system allowing me to edit and publish anything I could dream up, at very little cost.

I put my first website, a guide to Kenosha, online in 1996, just as the general public was beginning to use the Web. Before long, I was communicating with people all over the world — former Kenoshans living in Tokyo and Addis Ababa, and former Italian soldiers looking for old comrades back here. My site served as Kenosha’s unofficial online Chamber of Commerce long before the real Chamber ever went online.

Soon, companies began hiring me to do Web design for them, and I have continued to develop and maintain a variety of Web projects for the past 14 years.

Radio

Before the Web, the medium I loved best was radio, and one radio personality who really sparked my imagination as a young adult was Steve Dahl. I started haunting the show he did with Garry Meier in 1981 as a mysterious caller who phoned in with wacky tape creations I had edited together. This eventually turned into a daily job as the show’s “All My Children Update” guy, Mark from Kenosha, from 1982 to 1986.

A number of other commercial and public radio jobs followed, and I eventually returned to work for Steve Dahl on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. He needed someone to monitor news, surf the Internet, and do research for him behind the scenes while he was on the air. So, employed by CBS Radio, that was my job for the next seven years, until the show was canceled in December 2008.

Since then, I have immersed myself exclusively in new media, and have been helping small businesses use it to reach wider audiences.

Interests

In general, I love culture. I enjoy music and food and movies and literature from all over the world, and I want to be Anthony Bourdain or Samantha Brown or Michael Palin or Burt Wolf when I grow up. I am intrigued by the rustic and the traditional, and by folktales, customs, religion and mythology. I spent years reading and re-reading the work of Joseph Campbell, the single greatest teacher I have had in life.

Amy and I bought our home in Racine in 2005, and have since been soaking in the bliss of quiet domesticity. We both enjoy food and cooking, and have taken up gardening and landscaping. I play acoustic guitar for about 45 minutes to an hour each day, hoping to maintain the callouses on my fingertips.