Justin Ashdown

About Me

After high school I did a semester of college at a local community college. I was ready to do something other than go to school, so I joined the US Air Force as an avionics technican. My first assignment was at RAF Mildenhall, UK and I was there for 2 years. While there I worked on the MH-53M Pavelow IV. It is a huge helicopter, big enough to fit a small truck in the back. My next assignment was at Pope AFB in Fayetteville, NC. There I worked on C-130s, C-17s and C-5s. Those are the biggest aircraft the Air Force has.

I first met my wife, Joanna, when we were four years old. We were friends then and back door neighbors. Then at age 7, my family moved away to Houston, TX. Our parents still kept in contact and sent Christmas cards to each other. One year while I was still in the Air Force and stationed at Pope AFB, my mom included my phone number in the Christmas card she sent to Joanna's parents. Joanna called me on Christmas day. We had a few other random exchanges that winter and spring, but in the following summer Joanna got a job at a summer camp about an hour away from where I was and we were able to start dating. A couple years later we got married. A few years after that we had our first son, Daniel.

After the Air Force I went back to college. At the time Joanna was just my girlfriend and she had a job in South Bend, IN. Since I could go to school just about anywhere, I decided to also move to the South Bend area and go to Indiana University South Bend. I majored in Computer Science and three years later, with taking summer semester classes, I graduated. I've been doing web development ever since my last semester of school.

I love to play with electronics. I got a train set and I'm in the process of converting it from DC to DCC. That makes the train set digital so you can run multiple trains on the same track. That has been a slow process. I've also created my own DVR using a raspberry pi.