About Me

My name is Daniel Ryan, my friends and an inordinate amount of my enemies and hangers-on call me dryan. I call Chattanooga, Tennessee, home. After 22 years in Florida, I needed a change of scenery. About 4 hours into a visit to Lee University to see my friend Tylere Perron, I decided to move to Tennessee and attend Lee. Five years of Cleveland is a long time (as many of my friends know all too well). When I received admission to the University of Manchester, England, in 2005, I was ready to move again. I really had no plans of ever coming back for more than a visit. But after a few months in Manc I realized that Chattanooa was home. Following my programme I moved to the River City and settled down.

In May 2005 I graduated from Lee University with a BA in History with an emphasis in media. Following that, in 2006 I completed an MA in War, Culture, and History (with merit no less) at the University of Manchester. My thesis was titled US Civil War Memorialization in Southeast, Tennessee, 1865-1915 and focused on the Chickamauga National Military Park. I’m the 9th person in the world to hold this degree; and, yes, I’m being completely arrogant about that. Before embarking on my seven year trek through higher education, I worked at McDonald’s, Sears, DisneyWorld, and First Baptist Church of Haines City (now NorthRidge Church). I was also a freelance graphic artist from 1996-2006 and have been freelance photographer since 2000. Currently I spend my days at Coptix, an integrated marketing firm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as the Web Development Manager. Crazy ride, right? It makes sense to me, but I understand that it doesn’t to a lot of people. Coptix has been a great place for me. It’s full of great people, and Josiah, who work as a team and care about what we do. On a personal level, web front-end engineering (go standards!), history, my friends, music, photography and general geekery are my favorite things in life. I also enjoy tattoos quite a bit.

At one point (1996-1999), I ran On A Mission, a rather vague enterprise that was basically a network of bands local to the Central Florida area like saGoh (now Anberlin), Underoath, Delivery Boy, Nickel Plated Punk, Never the Less (from Florida, there seem to be several bands with this name), Slushball Derkins (now The Culprits), Goofy Foot, Atomsmashers Named Susie, One Man’s Blood, Eleventh Hour, My Own Skandal, and Upperoom. Once I arrived at Lee I was convinced to be the manager for Far From Us, an experience that led me to form my own record label, Vice Vs. Virtue Records. The label had signed to it Far From Us, Lawson, Rookie of the Year, and Bigger than Dallas. In 2003, VVV was bought out by my partner and good friend Tyler Orr and became 11:11 Records. While this label has now gone the way of the Caspian Tiger, First Street Studio still remains as the last, and best, vestige of VVV.

The biggest life change I have ever gone through was during the winter of 2002 through 2003. It started during Christmas break when I got a headache that would not go away. Four months later I found out I had meningitis. My neurologist estimates I was 9 months in with a disease that gets deadly around 12 months. My absence as I began to struggle with meningitis caused Tyler to decide to buy out VVV. I lost my short term memory for almost a year. During this time I met Dr. Barnett, my mentor and hero. Just as I was beginning to recover I went with him on a tour of the UK and Ireland. When I came back to school that fall I had come to grips with many areas of my life. I came out of the closet, finally, and publicly became an agnostic, something I had been feeling for a long time. I became a history major, dropping my telecommunications major over some personal struggles with the department. I set out to go to graduate school, which seemed impossible with the memory impairments I was dealing with. Thanks to Tylere and Sarah’s incessent playing of the movie game, I regained my memory. I was accepted to the University of Manchester in 2005 and the rest is literal, figurative and metaphorical history.

About the Site

This site was started in August 2002 as www.danielryan.net as a way for me to keep friends up to date with what’s going on in my life. In May 2005 I moved the site to www.wdanielryan.com. Why? Because I am vain and wanted a .com. Then in July 2006 I transitioned over to dryan.net to go for the shorter name. Sometimes I go for quite a stretch without posting while other times I have several posts in a day. Some days are just boring and some are less so. I added a gallery of my photography early on but that has since been replaced with my Flickr account. In 2004 I added what was called the “Academic Writings” section but it has been lost to the ages.

The site is run using WordPress and a variety of plugins. The design is by Justin Kropp, one of my favorite design ninjas. All of the html, css, and scripting is by yours truly. If you like what you see and want to aquire our services, please check out Coptix.

Contact Me

Email: daniel@dryan.net
AIM: daniel@dryan.net