About Me
I‘m Corey Ehmke, a technologist, musician, entreprenuer, and general tinkerer living in the Chicago area with my wife Lisa and my tween daughter Lydia.
Personal
Corey with Mysterious Gear
I have a tendency to adopt disposable hobbies, diving deep into anything that catches my attention and learning all I can about it for a period of months before moving on. The list includes electronics (including robotics and working with programmable microcontrollers like Arduino), creating music in my home studio (published under the name Dust and a Shadow), restoring my 1930s Tudor-style house, writing, drawing, cartooning, digital art, artificial intelligence, and yoga.
I’m always reading at least three books at a time: one fiction, one nonfiction, one technical. My taste in fiction tends to late 19th and early 20th century horror and weird fiction, but there are some modern exceptions (including Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Tim Powers, Neil Gaiman, Daniel Handler, and Clive Barker). If you’re interested, you can see what I’m currently reading.
In July I published my first book through Blurb. It’s called Kehr Wieder, and is a photo journal of an amazing trip I made with my grandmother last year to see her home town in Poland for the first time since World War II. I’m also planning to put out a series of books of photographs I’ve taken of cemeteries around the world sometime in the near future.
Professional
I started my first consulting business, Idol Hands Design, in Austin, Texas back in the early 90’s. Too early for the rest of the world to be interested in web design or development, Idol Hands initially provided freelance graphic design and multimedia services to local businesses and non-profit organizations. When the web revolution caught fire, I was ready. I built my first web site in 1993-- before graphical web browsers were even popular. As my skills and career developed, I spent less time pursuing freelance work through Idol Hands and concentrated more on my day job as a technology professional, first with the educational publisher Houghton Mifflin and later with the advertising giant Publicis Groupe. My off-hours development have been spent on a variety of Open Source projects.
Over the years I’ve created web sites and applications for organizations ranging from local businesses and non-profits to major organizations like Houghton Mifflin, Starbucks, the US Army, Morgan Stanley, Leo Burnett, Wieden+Kennedy, OralB, and National Instruments. I’ve also worked directly with industry partners like Adobe, Apple, and Quark.
I’ve worked with just about every web technology out there, from Java to WebObjects to ASP to PHP to LAMP, but my favorite by far is Ruby on Rails.
I’m currently a principal and Chief Solutions Architect for Mir Internet Marketing, working to revolutionize the world of online marketing and advertising.
See my resume or my LinkedIn Profile for more details.
Contact Me
Please feel free to try to contact me with your questions or comments by sending e-mail to inquiry at idolhands dot com. Please be advised that while I read my e-mail religiously, I’m sometimes slow to respond. Please don’t take it personally if you don’t hear back from me for a while.
For support with one of my Open Source or commercial software applications, send e-mail to software at idolhands dot com.
© 1996-2008 by Corey Ehmke. All rights reserved.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090919123141/http://www.idolhands.com:80/about