About

Hi there, I am Dan. I have put together some general parts of my life I think are interesting, but seriously… you can spend better time than to read this.

Early Years and Building Stuff

Growing up I had an unhealthy obsession with mini golf and building things out of Lego, Tinker Toys, K’nex and more. Fortunately my parents were very supportive of all the fun creations I have built. I was always building stuff.

Computers, The Unhealthy Addiction

In third grade, I recall going with my dad over to Circuit City to look at new computers. I had no idea what any of it was, but as a kid seeing all the neat technology I was so excited. We brought it home and immediately I spent an unhealthy amount of time on it. I started playing around with Windows 95 and how to get things done with the computer. A year or so later we got dial-up 14.4 service and then the world of the internet was open to me.

3 years later we got broadband the year it came out (known as Roadrunner internet at the time), and then I doubled down on technology. I started learning as years went on about custom computers, operating systems, networking, and pretty much every other aspect of technology. I was playing around visual basic, windows server, domain networks, game servers, and more.

The Technology Eye-opener from High School

In high school people knew me as the computer guy. You know that a lot of kids have to rebel against people in their teen years? Well, my rebelling was against the school IT admins. To be honest they weren’t the brightest but they got the job done. I would constantly bypass their stuff. My laptop when connected into the network (wired at the time) allowed me access to other computers because the remote software they had on computer labs and lounges had no password set. (Remember when I said they weren’t the brightest?). Like all power though, I did not ever want to cause havoc. I was more of a getting into things to say I could, but even I had my limits. 

One night after reading up on people stealing passwords I thought to myself, “this has to be easy to make an identical login to our grading system”. The login looked exact but when you submit it went to a clear page to tell you your form was sent. Any “hacker” or “scammer” would know that this is not how you do one if you were serious. You’d pass the information on and allow the login and they’d be none the wiser. 

Because of all my messing with the admins, my sessions were usually live monitored by one of them. They saw me open this up and freaked out (which I didn’t know at the time). I went on with my day, and the next day when we were in the computer lab, I went to sign in. My account was disabled. 

Me honestly not knowing what was going on, the vice principal came to get me. I sat in the office for about 3-4 hours not knowing what the hell was going on, which was quite frustrating. My parents arrive and we start meeting. They claim I am this hacker and was trying to steal passwords and I was changing grades. They claim I had a program that disabled their remote monitoring (I did, but I never used it). They were really stretching, however… they were serious. The principal told my parents I was the worst thing to happen in technology in the district. 

I could not disagree more, but I was a kid… not a tough kid. I was fucking crying because I knew no matter how I would explain things they wouldn’t believe me. My parents of course knew my character, my mom tried defending me and the principal actually shouted at her because she was questioning things. Then that got me mad. I was suspended while they “investigate”. 

I went home that night and analyzed my web server which is where I had the page stored. I saw logs that people using our school district’s IP were trying to scan around and brute force their way into my system. I had the logs. I went and told my mom that this is what happened. After, we started to do some legal research on if that was legal (and of course not! it’s my personal server). 

When we met again I finally had some ammo. One thing we all must learn in life is that if you’re trying to dig up evidence, you have to do it legally. If you illegally obtain evidence it will be thrown out. Fortunately, even if they got into my server it was not even used for anything bad because I wasn’t a hacker at all. 

When we showed the logs and my mom talked to him on this we essentially said “What you just did is illegal, you cannot just try to force your way into systems you do not own”. They took that information and logs and magically called me back the next day and said I could return to school (without the laptop) and I could not use networked computers. 

It was fine. I just wanted to get back to school, I wanted my life to return to some normal. Of course everyone was now afraid of me. All teachers treated me differently. They were all “briefed” on what happened. I am pretty sure they were fed the same lies that one of my friends was told by the IT Admins. One day he was at fleet farm and recognized her. He asked “what is the deal with Dan?” and she said with complete confidence that I was running a pay for grade change operation. I was so mad when I heard this… 

I learned a lot from all of this. When you do something in a specialty field (technology), you better hope the people “prosecuting” you know what they’re talking about. The school staff had no idea other than an IT Admin’s idea of what they portrayed. 

We could have had an iron case for a lawsuit. I am happy we didn’t do it. We all learned from this and moved on. 

Playing Unreal and SgtMuffin name origin

One of the questions I get asked a lot, and really flowed when I was on Daily Tech News Show in 2020… “Where did SgtMuffin come from?” Well, it is simple. I was playing UT2004 with friends and one used “Sgt._Pepper”. I did not have any name loyalty, and honestly I lack originality with names, so I just did Sgt.Muffin it was another food item. The name was a joke and had no other reason than that for why I picked it. 

The reason I never changed it is due to all the content I have made over the years for the game and people knew me as that. I really should have changed it early because honestly being an adult with that name is a little creepy, but I can assure you it has no innuendo or anything. I just imagine a muffin that is a drill sergeant. 

I really never played games for too long that were multiplayer. UT2004 was the first one that I really got into. Of course I did UT2003 demo a lot and played around but UT2004 is where I lost hours. The amount of mods that were available, and the player base was insane. You could play on one server that completely change the way the game worked and had such amazing custom content. I wanted to get in on that. 

My first and still active obsession is Assault mode Race maps. These maps are for Assault where you objectives that attackers need to get and defenders need to hold off the objectives as long as they can or until time runs out. Someone started making race maps where you drove vehicles around neat tracks to get to the objective. I thought it was so cool and wanted in on making some. 

I was able to get the help videos from the deluxe version of the game that had the DVD tutorials for Unreal Editor. I watched piles of them and used those to help me figure out how to develop maps. I was so addicted to this game that I would get up, go to school, come home and work on stuff all night long and play the game too. 

I started slowing down in College because the drive wasn’t there to work on it. Every once in a while still I’ll pop in with a new map or something like that. In the past 3-4 years there have been several map fixes, some new original maps like King of the Hill, along with special Turbo Vehicles, our PWC Patriot Missile (which is a joke at people to claim to be ‘patriots’) 

Finding my way after College

I went for an associate degree in Network Administration. The people I have met there have truly influenced me more than you’ll ever know. I still am in contact with several students as well as faculty. Me being so unique (because I wasn’t that social) made me a memorable person if you met me. 

The worry I had is what type of job did I want to go into? There were several positions hiring in the college but they were help desk and other IT support type jobs and I wasn’t sure if that was the route I wanted to go. Fortunately, in February 2007, a few months before I was to graduate, my uncle reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in some part time work to update their website. The website was for the family business that has been in business for 4 generations. Of course I said yes. I didn’t know my uncle or his business partner well, but we all had a mutual respect for each other. 

I came into the position blind and had to start learning the business so I could know what to put on the website. I’ll admit, over the years the site design was pretty meh, but one thing that was important to me was to have actual information. Real helpful information always wins over beautiful say nothing websites. 

Finding my way at the Family Business

Let me be clear, I had no intentions at all of working at the family business, but the fact that I got to use my skills made me very interested working in a small business atmosphere. I’ve worked part time in corporate America and I hated it. Here we were so small and everything was 1 on 1 which is great. 

My uncle gave me a blank slate and allowed me to use my creativity. Everyone there was supportive and really made me comfortable being there, although starting off nobody knew I started which was kind of awkward. 

As time went on I kept taking on small little things to help the company out. I tried to make the branding more unified by adding special screensavers, wallpapers, and more on the company PCs, and starting to design our marketing materials. While I don’t think my original designs were that great, they were different… and that’s how you stick out. We had the same ad just changed based on season… other than that the ads were not changing before me.

I was offered full time after graduating. And after three years of becoming another office helper I started getting into development. Here is where I start to make huge lasting changes and helped turn the company into the machine it is today…

Building Software

We two estimators, which turned into three estimators. Two of them were old school and would lie and make shit up to try to get more leads. We did our best to toggle leads and keep things fair, but no matter what we did they would just bitch about it. God forbid, they turn and look at their process and their abilities… but whatever that’s for another rant… 

I thought to myself we could just make a program that toggles for us and gives us a calendar to find a time in, and then it would tell us who it is with. That way the computer would balance it and there would be a log file showing the proof in how it worked. I built the program and it worked, but it didn’t stop the complaining. It did, however, get us more organized. While we still use a variation of this program today (that has added features like attachments, customer management, etc) the real change began in a meeting in 2011-2012 time.

We were all meeting and my favorite thing happened, I was  asked if I could do something. I love the challenge of trying to solve workflow problems. I was asked “Dan, is there a way we could send call details to our technicians, so they had the job information.” Of course I could do that! The first step was to learn how the proprietary scheduler we used operated. Fortunately (in a cringe way) it ran on a .mdb file, but that means I can talk to it with PHP! I built a special dispatch board that showed a copy of what they say in our scheduling software, with a push button. 

Technicians would receive a text message with a special crafted url allowing them to view the details. They would be able to see the information, press to get driving directions, and close out a job when they are done. Shortly after I added support for attached a photo of the invoice when the closed the job. Because 3G was the standard, I had to do some magic to client-side shrink the upload before it was send to the server, and I was able to get attachments down to around 180kb which uploaded in 5-10 seconds. I set up multi-part upload files so it would auto recover and re-assemble server side (for reliability).

This changed everything… but I wasn’t done at all. I kept going. Feature after feature. Some were asked for by employees, some had more challenges where I got to figure out how to solve it, and some were just common sense features we should add. Today, the software runs everything. It does a lot. The code base is over 2 million lines of code. I wrote literally everything including the document encryption engine and authentication systems. There was something I liked about doing everything myself. Much like Steve Gibson of GRC I enjoy having full control over the code. I know it will run efficiently and having to do all aspects really helped me learn more about systems and the programming language (as well as security obviously).

And my future changed

In 2016 I was asked by my Uncle if I wanted to be part of the next ownership at the company. I was amazed and floored by that. It never crossed my mind as an option. I was happy doing what I was doing. I was earning enough to live on (but for my skill set horribly underpaid). I agreed right then and there I was interested. In the years I have had there already I knew what type of company I was getting involved in and I know that we would do just fine.

At the end of 2019 we worked out all the legal work and myself and my cousin became business partners. I am very fortunate to be able to work with him. He knows all the stuff I don’t, and vice-versa. We make a great team. We joke but we also can get serious when we need to. Buying a company during a pandemic sure sucked but our business was not hurt too bad by it. We’re lucky.

That brings us to today. I have turned from the shy computer guy that was anti social into a successful businessman. While typing this I just did 6 interviews last week. I never ever imagined myself in this position, but I am very happy and my employees trust me and my cousin. I can’t wait to see what we can do in the world of business for years to come.