About this site…
Onefreevoice.com is my attempt at gaining presence and mindshare on the web. It’s mostly a failed attempt. More than anything, I use it as my personal home page. The site is designed by me, for me, and serves as a springboard for all those places that I like browse on a regular basis. You could think of it as my own online links repository, photo store, notepad, etc. Although I don’t actively discourage visitors (the comments are mostly turned off to avoid blog spam), I’m not really actively seeking them either. If you happened upon this page somehow, thank you for coming.

About me…
My name is Gregory J. Haase and I’m a jack-of-all trades and master of none. I’m fairly good at doing a lot of things, but there isn’t any one thing that I really kill at. I think this stems out of my utter curiousity to explore and try new things. Before I can become fully competent in any one discipline, I off trying/learning something new and different. My life has always been this way.

I have a Bachelor of Science in Music Recording (MUMR) from the University of Southern California. Unless you’re in the right place at the right time, there’s no money in it. Don’t get me wrong, you can make a decent living at it. But probably not enough to live comfortable and pay back your student loans.

Music is an agony for me and a perfect illustration of my inability to stick with one thing. Since the forth grade I have played Saxophone, Piano, Flute, Guitar, and Xylophone. I spent enough time on each to be able to play fairly simple music, but not enough on any of them to astound anyone. I’m pretty competent at music theory - I know where the notes are and how they are supposed to fit together. I can sight read like a demon. The disconnect between my mind and my fingers seems to be the biggest problem.

At one point, I spent all my time trying to get every muisc program, audio plugin, synthesizer, etc. for the PC that I could get my hands on. I was going to do a bunch of digital music and home recording. I did this for probably 3 years. I spent tons of time playing around with new software and effects - getting everything digitally wired up and ready to use. In fact, I spent so much time setting everything up and toying around with it that I never completed an entire work in 3 years. I don’t remember actually giving it up (in fact I still toy from time-to-time), but it’s not something I do regularly anymore.

Right now I’m concentrating on being decent at LAMP development. I’m almost there. I can complete a project. I can make a database and populate it, and write a medium to large-sized application that uses it. I’ve done a few side jobs that illustrate this. Right now I’m off exploring PHP5 and mySQL5. I want to figure out OOP (which right now makes my head spin) and stored procedures. Ultimately, I want to write my own LAMP framework that I can use to easily construct new projects. I realize that a plethera of these currently exist, but I think I will only truly understand it through the process of making my own.

Along with LAMP development is my foray into design. I can use design tools. I know how to do clever things in GIMP and Inkscape (and photoshop before I became a full-time Linux user). Again, I’m competent at it - I designed this site. I can just about design a site that doesn’t totally suck. But I just can’t get it to the next level and make a design that kills. I did make a version of tux for the Linux Users Group in Princeton of which I am proud.

Some Things I Really Kill At
Actually, there are a couple of areas - I wouldn’t necessarily call them disciplines - that I’m really, really good at. I think these relate to the last line in the wikipedia article on Jack-of-all-trades posted above:

A Jack of all trades may be a master of integration, since the individual knows enough from many learned trades and skills to be able to bring their disciplines together into a practical finished product.

I’m really good at connecting things together. In my current place of work, I’m the go-to guy for people who have problems or need answers. It’s not that I’m a know-it-all. But I either know enough or am curious enough to get the basics and point people in the right direction. Because of my curiousity, I’m really good at finding things, figuring things out, mining information, etc (I’m a master at Google). I’m also pretty good at remembering who the subject domain experts are at a given thing, and I can quickly redirect questions to the proper people.

I’m also killer at defining and implementing complex workflow. I support a few applications that have very convoluted business rules around who does what and when, and I’m really good at it. If you need an application that has business rules like “If it’s a blue moon on a Tuesday in the second week of an odd numbered month in an even numbered year that is not a leap year” then I’m your man. Somehow, I’m able to abstract this stuff into basic signal flow and routing and map it from point ‘a’ to point ‘z’. This is basically a trick I learned in recording school. When you have everything wired up through myriad pieces of equipment and you press record and nothing happens, you have to be able to quickly figure out where the problem is. You need to carefully trace the signal from the beginning to the end. If you don’t do it in a systematic way, you’ll never get things working before the session ends. What this all boils down to on the programming front is the ability to implement complicated conditional logic.

The other thing I’m really good at is vision. When a client comes to me with a business problem or application need, I’m quickly able to grasp the problem and come up with a proposed solution. Within minutes, I’m envisioning all the complex layers and rules that need to be created in the code, what the UIs need to look like, how the process works, etc. This usually immediately leads to questions or observations that leaves the client saying things like “I never thought about it that way before” or “I didn’t think that was possible.” Of course, an important aspect of this is also knowing when not to create an application. Often times a solution exists and the client either isn’t using it at all or isn’t using it to full potential. Sometimes they just need some help thinking outside the box, or a finger pointing in the right direction.