Southeastern News Online July, 2004 Vol. 2  No. 2

Featured SENYLRC Staff Member: Chris Hyzer

Chris Hyzer, SENYLRC Systems Manager, has been employed with Southeastern for just over two years. A native of Franklin, NY which is a village of 560 located in central New York, Chris is a graduate of Franklin Central School. He graduated from Marist College in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology. Chris’s role at Southeastern is to assist staff with computer and technological aspects of their jobs. He describes this task as helping with “anything that plugs in” including VCR’s, projectors, and computer software. Chris said he also “keeps intruders out of our machines”, “makes services go” and provides computer support for implementation of Internet-related projects such as the digitization project using ContentDM, Ariel, the SEAL gateway, EZ Proxy and hospital web pages.

Chris was eight years old when his interest in computers began. He was given a Tandy Color Computer for Christmas that year which he first used to play games. His father encouraged him to do more and “when I learned how to program it to make it do what I wanted, then I was hooked”. By the time he was in junior high school, he was helping others, including some of his school teachers, with their computers. He received so many phone calls requesting computer help, even from people he had never met, that by age thirteen he turned it into a business. The business is now closed except for a few customers in central New York because Southeastern’s computers take up much of his time.

In his spare time, Chris indicated that he likes to ride his bike, tinker with his car, play with his TiVo digital video recorder, and work on his own computer projects. He has a collection of old Radio Shack TRS-80 computers. Chris also likes to travel. He has been to Europe several times including a trip to Rome as part of the Marist Singers where the group sang with the Sistine choir and performed chant responses with Pope John Paul II. On holidays, Chris heads upstate for family visits, and during weekends he may be found traveling locally or visiting friends in Connecticut.

Chris’s biggest work pet peeve is being asked if a SENYLRC server is down before the caller checks their own Internet connection first. His advice for living everyday life is “use your turn signal properly”.

By Judy Fischetti, Member Services Librarian

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