About

I met computers early. Some of my first memories are on a Windows XP machine in the early 2000s, playing 3D Pinball — Space Cadet, the one that came free in the Start menu. I didn't have a word for what I was looking at yet. I knew I liked the way the machine answered back when I did something to it.

A few years of military service came next. I served in the U.S. Navy, and the work put me around systems that had to stay up no matter what — where a wrong number or a missed connection was not an option.

After the Navy, I spent my career close to those systems: writing software, standing up servers, wiring networks, keeping information systems running. Different titles, one thread — get the pieces to work together.

What all of it taught me is plain. I like learning technology, and I like to tinker. I open something up to see how the parts connect, why they connect, and why each one matters to the next. The correlation between systems holds my attention longer than any single system does.

So, welcome to my big next project.

sounding began as a tool for my wife and me. We were house-hunting, and the math lived in a spreadsheet — a wall of cells we re-typed for every listing. I wanted something faster than punching numbers into Excel, with cleaner graphics, in a format we could hand to each other and read like a real report instead of a worksheet.

Here is the part that stung. When we bought our home, we didn't know how much the supplemental tax would cost us. We didn't know about the Mello-Roos we would still be paying — a fixed charge that can run hundreds a month, on top of everything else. The bills showed up after we had already signed. We were over budget that year, and we spent a lot of it wishing we had seen those numbers before the deal, not after.

"Sounding" is the report I wish we'd had. Every hidden line, in your monthly number from the start.

If this makes your San Diego home search a little clearer, that would mean a lot. Two small asks:

• Share it with friends and family who are looking. Word of mouth is how a small site like this survives.
• Tell me what's broken. If you find a wrong number or something that doesn't add up, contact me through the contact page, there's an intake form there for you to fill out, I read every one.

And if you'd like to buy me a coffee, I'd love that too — it helps keep the site up.

Thanks for stopping by. Come back and poke around; there's more depth here on what you'd be getting into before you buy.