Dr. Ryan Czerwinski found!

[takemehomegrandma]

Merlancia didn't had any real products, just big talk.

But hey, did he buy walker case desing rights??

Yes and IIRC he got some Amiga IP license as well...

[A1260]

I understand he was also spotted a few years ago as the cover of, "Today's Modern Amish Male" magazine. I see not much has changed.

i guess it was this photo then?...

[A1260]

That is some zany shit! Can't help but think I just watched a Loony Toons episode looking into this guy.  lol

more history here...
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/merlancia/merlancia.html

[B00tDisk]

tl;dr he bought that styrofoam box cut into the shape of an STB that Gateway threw together for the '99 Gateway Amiga show, spent three years bloviating about how he was producing a new computer, pulled in Dave Haynie and another former C= engineer, never paid them, stole A1200s and so forth from an Amiga, Inc. warehouse/storage bin, sold those and used Amiga junk out of a shithole masquerading as a storefront with his mom, disappeared.

And now has reappeared and is in to cigars, being ballpunched and peed on.

[cv643d]

He is Amish for real?

What is it with former leaders of Amiga and their religion. Bill truckdriver was a hardcore christian travelling with his bible all over the place (FYI, this is not normal behavior here in europe ).

[Firedawg]

And now has reappeared and is in to cigars, being ballpunched and peed on.

A.org is the place for honest perspective.  Now that is funny, thx BOOtDisk you made my day! :roflmao::roflmao::roflmao:

[Rob]

Maybe Dr. Ryan and Doomy should do a duet.

[AmigaHeretic]

And now has reappeared and is in to cigars, being ballpunched and peed on.

It's funny when you put it that way, but it's true.

When he put that he was into being pee'd on and "water sports", I had a good laugh.  I'd never heard that term before.  Wish that site was never found though.  Did we really need to find out he was circumcised?

I feel a little damaged emotionally now, like the first time I got rolled to goat.se

[ferrellsl]

Speaking of scoundrels, whatever happened to the guy in Canada who was supposed to engineer and market a new Amiga but every time the date got close for him to release his hardware, some contrived tragedy would occur.  I think the last excuse he used was that his father died and that was over 2 years ago if my memory doesn't fail me.  Why does the Amiga seem to have more than its fair share of scouldrels, thieves and liars?

[hardlink]

... pulled in Dave Haynie and another former C= engineer, never paid them ...

That is my problem with him. You can be weird as you want to be, just don't screw good people over. The 'Count' was very entertaining, but he went over the line. He had the nerve or ignorance to show up at Dave's Hayniefest at his house in New Jersey one time with the girl that won the Amiga tattoo conteat (Crystal??)

http://www.devtopics.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/amiga.jpg


I think this was before he ripped Dave off. If he *ever* shows up in New Jersey again, I have some friends that would like to meet him.

[B00tDisk]

Speaking of scoundrels, whatever happened to the guy in Canada who was supposed to engineer and market a new Amiga but every time the date got close for him to release his hardware, some contrived tragedy would occur.  I think the last excuse he used was that his father died and that was over 2 years ago if my memory doesn't fail me.  Why does the Amiga seem to have more than its fair share of scouldrels, thieves and liars?

Adam Kowalski (that's a phonetic pron. of his name).  

Here's the thing: the PC is a commodity item and to a lesser but still prevalent degree, the Macintosh is too (well, the mac = PC now in terms of architecture but that's another discussion)...

at any rate, the only people left in the Amiga community - I mean the die-hard, day-to-day, yes-this-is-the-computer-I-use-Ibrowse-is-better-than-firefox types - are hardcore fans who think that any month now someone's going to announce something that will help the Amiga rise up and smite down the Evil Empire (apple or microsoft depending on the week).  IOW, dreamers.  It's easy to catch them up in the fervor of promises of world-beating hardware and software with totally unrealistic specs and so on.  They want something to hang on to.

The PC on the other hand?  It's entirely open, open to scrutiny down to the direction the atoms in Intel or AMD CPUs lean.  You can't really create a motherboard company and, say, suggest that in six months you'll have an 8ghz 32 core board that supports nine-way SLI etc. etc.

[B00tDisk]

Also I think one of the saddest things was how he pulled Harv Laser in

I used to buy Amazing/Amiga (one of the last if not the last US made Amiga print magazines) and read Harv's columns with great enjoyment and enthusiasm.

It was either here, or on usenet, I made a comment about "Dr. Ryan" and got a nasty email (or PM - it was pre big-crash so if it was here I of course have no recollection) from Harv telling me to STFU, I didn't know what was really going on, don't believe the haters, great things were afoot, blah blah blah blah.

And it appears that relationship continues on.

[ferrellsl]

Yeah, Kowalski, that's the guy.  I'd like to buy a whole case of whoop-ass for guys like that.

[AmigaHeretic]

From an old Amiga.org interview by Kess with Dave:

Can you shed some light on the relationship you have/had with Merlancia?

I had known Ryan Czerwinski, somewhat casually, through the Amiga community. He made my Summer 2000 house party, I guess I saw him a few other times, like the 2001 Gateway show (I was interested in AmigaDE for use in the Phoenix STB). A weirdo, sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in my business.

As I was coming off the Met@box disaster, and not thinking terribly clearly I suppose, Ryan came by my 2001 summer party (also my 40th birthday party) and offered me the CTO job at Merlancia. Far as I knew, Merlancia was a small company based in Arizona, doing a variety of hardware projects, and funded by Czerwinski, who was apparently independently wealthy. Early on, things seemed to support that. For example, I flew with Ryan to meet with Bill McEwan at Amiga, Inc.; Ryan claimed they had about $650,000 ear-marked for his set-top/small computer project. Not a king’s ransom, but a reasonable amount for the work at-hand. So no alarms immediately.

The alarms began soon enough, though. First thing, Ryan was trying to weasel out of the agreement we had (verbal/email, sure, but that’s precisely the same as a full written contract, for the purposes of employment). Secondly, his supposed secretary, Christina, was making executive level decisions about who got paid, etc. Then there was the growing list of former associates of Merlancia’s, all of whom seemed to be owed substantial money.

We brought Skal Loret and Fred Wright on that fall, and that’s where things really started breaking. No one was getting paid. Ryan was disappearing for days at a time. He claimed to be an engineer, yet was stumbling on the most basic of things, and clearly had no concept about how engineering was done, or the time frames involved in product development. I guess, in retrospect, he knew his house of cards was falling, and wanted to get _something_ before it crashed.

I should have got out then, but I stuck it on for a few more months, and the lies just got thicker. The sad thing was, Skal and I had outlined a very real product strategy, using OEMed boards, to deliver a product that Skal could actually sell. Basically, nearly everything Ryan and Christina did from November 2001 to February 2002 could be explained as little other than sabotage.

So I spent some time, dug deep, and discovered that, basically, it was all a sham. Merlancia, as I’m sure some of your readers know, was nothing more than a storefront, with a few Amiga things for sale, and a bunch of that junk that Christina sells on eBay. Christina turned out to be Christina Czerwinski, Ryan’s mother. Ryan turned out not to be rich, but perhaps supported by a trust fund by his father (never married), who is apparently well-to-do and living in Florida.

And as it turns out, Ryan himself was the biggest lie of all. He was not an engineer, or a college graduate, in fact... I have my doubts about High School. He wasn’t 40, as he claimed, or “maybe in his early 30's”, as I guessed, but in fact, 19 or so at the time. So boy, did I feel stupid, being fooled by a kid, even if, as Skal guesses, he’s from Gypsy blood. Thing is, you don’t expect this level of fraud. I mean, he got to make some enemies, destroy any possible reputation he would ever have in the computer business, miss a genuine opportunity to actually BE something like what he pretended to be, probably wind up being chased by the IRS at some point (did he every pay FICA and all that other withholding he took from the little salary any of us got?) and what did he get in return? The right to day “Dave Haynie – CTO” on his web page for a few months. Idiot!

http://landley.net/history/mirror/commodore/haynie.html

[Debaser]

From an old Amiga.org interview by Kess with Dave:


http://landley.net/history/mirror/commodore/haynie.html

I remember reading this and it still gets me to this day..

Man oh man - that is certainly a testament as to why Dave became so jaded with the idea of NG-Amiga systems I am sure.

What a shame.

[Debaser]

He is Amish for real?

What is it with former leaders of Amiga and their religion. Bill truckdriver was a hardcore christian travelling with his bible all over the place (FYI, this is not normal behavior here in europe ).

Amiga and religion... hehe ironic.