Dragoon Mountains, Arizona · N0CVP
Engineering leader and builder. Personal AI, real systems, and a ranch at the end of a dirt road in the Dragoon Mountains.
I live and work on a ranch in the Dragoon Mountains of southeast Arizona with my wife, Sheridan — horses, dogs, chickens, a hydroponic garden, and more uptime monitoring than any household needs.
I've spent thirty-five years in engineering, the last decade leading organizations, without ever letting go of the keyboard. These days most of what I build is personal AI: agents that run real parts of a real household, on hardware I can see from my desk.
The office runs on its own solar; the writing here runs on what I learn keeping all of it alive.
I'm also a ham radio operator — N0CVP — which is its own kind of building: antennas, propagation, and patience.
Governance, FinOps, and auditable oversight for financial services: navigating the shift from autocomplete copilots to autonomous multi-step execution while enforcing architectural send boundaries, deterministic FinOps, and least agency.
My AI assistants work side by side, ask each other for second opinions, and bring their permission requests to one rail. Corral Light is the public version you can run yourself.
The on-ramp. One prompt that turns Claude Code into a personal AI operating system — free, public, novice-friendly.
The floor under it — a secrets vault that fails closed, a scheduler, a run log, and a check that notices when a job goes quiet. Generated from the live ranch system, not written about it.
Seventeen guides to growing food at 4,700 feet on the east side of the Dragoons — peppers to pomegranates, soil to table. Written for this ground, where the water is hard and the winter window runs backwards.
My family in four headwaters — Elizabethtown, Grand Ronde, Flanders, Ohio. Traced through state archive certificates, the Belgian civil registers of one village, the census rolls, a Wisconsin probate file, and a county history written by a member of the family in 1901. Written for my mother.
An interactive Great Circle world map visualizing 6,869 radio contacts across 202 DXCC entities made from St. David, Arizona (DM41vv), with distance, azimuth, and time-lapse propagation playback.