About Me

Hey, I'm Dustin — IT Director at Village Capital & Investment LLC, where I handle everything from infrastructure strategy to day-to-day systems. I've always been hands-on with technology: if something needs to be built, automated, or untangled, I'm in it until it's running smooth. Mapping shared printers by IP or security group, writing PowerShell so deployments are one script instead of twenty clicks, tuning Docker stacks — solving problems in fun, scalable ways is kind of my whole thing.

At work I live in enterprise land: high-availability servers, network design, and secure infrastructure that scales. I like building systems that just work and keep working, whether that's in a corporate datacenter or the lab in my house. Big on automation, virtualization, and containers (Docker Compose especially) — if I don't have to babysit it, I built it right.

Tech and gaming go back to the very beginning for me. Late 90s: a NES and the original GameBoy, endless hours of Super Mario Bros 3, Duck Hunt, and Pokémon Blue. Christmas 2003 I got a GameBoy Advance SP and disappeared into Pokémon Sapphire, Ruby, Fire Red, and Leaf Green. In 2004 came the Sega Dreamcast — Sonic Adventure 2, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue. That's about when tech got its hooks in me for good. I recorded my Shenmue gameplay on our VCR and thought it was magic; what I wouldn't give to watch those tapes today. It's also when I met my lifelong best friend Leno, who was into all the same stuff I was.

By 2005 I'd moved to the original Xbox and found my love for more mature titles — Halo, Halo 2, MechAssault 2. I got my first taste of Xbox Live before the 360 even launched. I still remember the Cox techs installing the Docsis 2 modem in our apartment to get the Xbox online, and me being the one to call them whenever the internet went down. I had 192.168.1.1 memorized before I was a teenager.

2006 changed everything. I upgraded to the Xbox 360 and, way more importantly, got my first PC: a Dell Dimension 2400 with a printer and a 4:3 1280x768 Dell monitor. Once I had the internet in front of me, curiosity took over — emulators, LimeWire, torrenting, and the rabbit hole of creative modding. I started modding Halo CE and uploading my recordings to a brand-new site I'd just signed up for called YouTube. Two decades on that platform now. Below is the actual video I posted in 2006 at age 13 (listen to my baby voice at the end haha).

Through 2007-2009 I kept making videos and sinking hours into the 360 — ChromeHounds, The Outfit, The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II. Then Leno and I picked up Command & Conquer: Generals at Walmart and lost entire middle-school days to it. It came with World Builder, a custom map editor with scripting, and I went deep: making maps, learning the backend systems from YouTube videos, and sketching map layouts on paper at school when I should've been doing literally anything else.

Building things has always been in my DNA. At the end of 2009 I put together my first fully custom computer by myself (seen below), and that project kicked off a lifelong hardware obsession. I still build PCs for work and friends all the time, and I love watching how the ecosystem keeps advancing.

Anime's been in the rotation since around 2005 — Inuyasha on Adult Swim, Zoids, Pokémon. By 2009 I was keeping up with weekly releases and never really stopped.

By 2010 I knew my way around content creation, Windows installs, HDD partitions, and hardware. I'd also caught the old-audio bug — receivers and speakers — which is still with me today in my Plex and home cinema setup. Here's a snapshot of my life back then.

In 2011 I was living in Austin, TX, where I landed my first job: Computer Technician Intern. I built custom computers for sale out of donated parts, refurbished Dell towers, and touched Linux (Ubuntu / Mint) for the first time. Here's a photo of the old shop—it was heaven to me.

My first paychecks went right back into the things I loved: games, manga, and — of course — more tech. Here's the setup that came out of that, with three monitors, Nvidia Surround, and dual GPUs in SLI.

Around the same time I was getting into the heavier stuff: Hamachi servers, SSH, flashing custom firmware onto my MP3 players — even flashing the firmware on my Xbox 360's DVD drive so it would play the .ISO backups I burned to disc. Photo from that era below.

Near the end of the internship I bought my first car, and the video I made about it ended up being one of my most popular uploads.

Watching anime eventually turned into collecting it. I've picked up dozens of figures over the years with a soft spot for Nendoroids, and I'm especially proud of owning nearly every Jibril figure ever released — she's been my top waifu since 2014!

Cars are the other big one. Right now I drive a 2019 Kia K900, upgraded from a 2007 Lexus LS 460 L — I've always loved giant sedans for the comfy ride and the space. The K900 is genuinely rare, too: only around 2,000 were sold in the US across the 2019-2020 model years before it was discontinued. For perspective, Ferrari built over 15,000 458 Italias, and some Porsche 911 variants outnumber the entire US run of this car. A luxury barge almost nobody bought — and I love it.

My latest obsession is AI art and Stable Diffusion. I know it's a divisive topic, but I couldn't be more excited about it — as a creative person who never put in the drawing hours, being able to generate exactly the image in my head is incredible. Being an anime fan, I make a lot of character art with Forge and Stable Diffusion on my RTX 4090, and I've gotten pretty good at it over the last few years. You can see some of my work on my Civit.ai profile.

These days, when I'm not running cables, installing security systems, breaking the network to make it better, or tweaking server configs, I'm usually working on something personal — this website, my board game Factions of Fate, or the homelab stack you see below.

Tech isn't just my job — it's the lens I see the world through. Optimizing TrueNAS metadata VDEVs, troubleshooting SAS HBAs, messing with Ollama and local LLMs, turning a card game I designed into a browser game with zero game-dev experience — I'm always learning, always refining, and always pushing to make cool things even cooler.

This site is where I share all of it.