Biography

Jeff Cryderman | A (not so brief) Autobiography. see short version

Once upon a time...

1984 was the year that I got my first computer...a Commodore VIC-20. That was AWESOME. It had 20Kb of RAM and a cassette tape drive for storage. It seems a little hard to comprehend now when an average photo is measured in Mb and my kids have never even heard of a cassette tape that this thing was state of the art. It was also my first introduction to programming. I would spend countless hours after computer camp typing in endless lines of code. One typo however would ruin hundreds of lines of code and without any sort of keyboarding skills I was really at the mercy of luck. Many of the "projects" were above my skill set at the time but I did manage to write a program to count...to infinity and beyond! I didn't know it at the time but this was the beginning.

Fast Forward 10 years...

An Audio Engineer by trade, I hold diploma's in Audio Engineering and Recorded Music Production from TREBAS Institute, beginning my career in 1995 at Cherry Beach Sound and Comfort Sound recording studios. During my years in Rock 'n' Roll I amassed album credits from artists such as Moxy Fruvous, Snow, and Montel Jordan to name a few. Perhaps my greatest experience and most memorable credit was a project called 2B3 | The Toronto Sessions. Working with Producer Lance Anderson (Oscar Peterson) and Engineer Nick Blagona (Deep Purple) to record the top Rock'n'Roll organ players accompanied by musicians like Richie Hayward (Little Feat) and Dominic Triano (Bush) was an experience providing both a wealth of knowledge and a lifetime of memories.

Enter Corporate AV

The recording studio business began to change with the emergence of digital recording technologies. Home studio's became so affordable that many recording artists were able to use a do-it-yourself approach. This prompted me to make a change, joining Telav/ISTS in 1998. A Corporate Audio Visual Technician is a little difficult to explain to people unfamiliar with technology so I would often refer to myself as a "Roadie for Corporate Rock'n'Roll". This isn't really what it was all about but the masses seemed to grasp the concept on a base level.

Audio Engineering somehow didn't have the same luster in the corporate environment, mixing podium mic's with table mic's just wasn't the same as mixing a guitar with lead vocals so I began to seek new challenges. This was my intorduction to something called Interactive Audience Response, a technology in it's infancy. It is 1999 and the second generation of the Windows Operating System about to be released, yet I had to re-learn DOS to program the software. This was not my first introduction to programming but it was really the beginning of my true interest in solving a problem in a language other than English.

Corporate AV | The Next Chapter

Having travelled throughout North America (much more often than my wife would have liked) as "The Keypad Guy" I was truly becoming imersed in the computer. I had become somewhat of an expert making me the logical choice to take on the challenge of the newest thing...Webcasting. Although the company I worked for did not directly offer this solution at the time I was called upon to oversee the sub-contractors who were providing this service. I had played with HTML code in college but this was cool.

I really enjoyed this new form of communication. So much so that I began experimenting with the technology to see what it was all about. This led to my promotion to the newly crated position of "National Product Manager | Integrated Solutions". So what is Integrated Solutions? Essentially in the AV business it is anywhere a Computer touches AV. I was responsible for the Polling Systems, Encoding and Webcasting Services.

Bringing It All Into Focus

The knowledge I would gain as a Product Manager would prove invaluable even after I left the position. My next challenge would come in the form of focusing my efforts. Joining the IT department of one of the "Big 4" accounting firms, my primary responsibility became that of webcast engineer. I had moved away from managing the process and dove headfirst into the technology. This was it...I was there. Producing a new interface to track users was among my greatest acomplishments to date and annually I would produce 80+ webcasts both internally within the organization and also externally to clients.

The birth of jeffcrydermanDOTcom

I am an avid curler...and after one look at the website for my curling club I said "It may be time for an update", and so i did just that. Taking over the website of the Oshawa Curling Club I was able to modernize it's look, and functionality to the point that our members are visiting the site more often, traffic was increasing and in may people's opinion we not only have the best curling ice around but also the best website.

It was then that I decided to start jeffcrydermanDOTcom to provide websites for small business' at a reasonable cost and develop useable web applications for custom purposes.

What's next?

The answer to that question is really up to you. Click HERE to contact me about your project. Who know's, you might just be the next chapter in my autobiography.