Hi.

I'm Brian Shumate, a fairly nondescript 30-something creative geek who works like a robot and is passionate about what goes on over TCP port 80, from design and development, to accessibility, user experience, and interface.

When I'm not working, I enjoy time spent with my wonderful wife Dawn and our children- we like the outdoors, making art, and traveling together- I'm often an extreme gadget head and tinkerer in my spare time as well.

Sometimes, I get remarks about still being in touch with my home planet, 1 whenever I'm playing with various communications gear, building antennas, or wielding the soldering iron as amateur radio operator2 K4APP.

Work Stuff

I have about 25 years of intense computer shenanigans under my belt, with approximately 15 of those years working professionally in various technology fields. I've done everything from writing and saving thousands of lines of BASIC code to cassette tapes, to booting Slackware Linux 1.0 off 3.5" floppies, to developing an embedded operating system instance 3 that powers point of sale devices for the largest convenience store chain in Canada.

I currently enjoy the honor of working on major web projects and serving as technical lead for a significant Drupal CMS initiative at Appalachian State University, a rapidly evolving liberal arts and teaching university in the mountains of northwestern North Carolina.

When not working and playing, I also stay busy with personal web projects which tend to involve even more Drupal! (it's highly addictive) Recently, I've also been lugging around a Posterous-powered web application designed to share 21st century-style Boone, North Carolina news, blogs, and media, but it too will one day move to Drupal as well.

1. 1. due to the various weird bits of hardware, antennas, and other such gear. As an interesting aside, I once traveled through DCA with a Yaesu FT-817 and various bits of related gear like a tuner, antennas, and so on... The TSA agent basically looked at this, and all of the other nerd bits in my backpack in exasperation, and said, "Sir, I cannot identify most of what is in your bag. Can you help me out by explaining some of this stuff to me?" It was a moment of geek pride, to say the least.
2. 2. Amateur Radio is often referred to as "Ham Radio", too.
3. 3. That would be Microsoft Windows XP Embedded.  Filed under painful life lessons. :-/