Yours truly produced this entire site all by himself.
If you don't know anything about XHTML and CSS then be duly impressed with my Web coding wizardry. If you do, try not to laugh too hard at my code.
This should be self explanatory, given my career path. I thought it would be rather amusing to mimic a modular newspaper layout, not realizing the headache this would pose from a coding standpoint. I also borrowed a few style cues from a certain venerable East Coast paper, as well as its Web site.
Merriam-Webster defines it thusly; it is also the name of more than one newspaper in the United States, most notably a New Orleans daily. Seems a silly name for a newspaper; perhaps it is meant to be ironic—that was certainly my intent, although some might argue that my usage is truthful, rather than ironic.
In any event, I'm just having a wee bit of fun at my own expense, as well as that of pompous small-town papers in general.
Experienced journalist with photography skills and a restless soul—has laptop, camera; will travel. That's
really all you need to know.
But if you must know more, I'm a 39-year-old journalist, photographer and wanna-be author; this is my vanity site. People actually pay me to do the first two things. The third thing is always in the back of my thoughts; perhaps someday my muse will actually get her stuff together and light a fire under my butt.
Being a novelist was actually a childhood dream of mine; I'll never forget my mother's reaction when, at 12 years old, I informed my parents that I wanted to be a writer. I could tell she was a little nonplussed (not a word I would have used at 12). "Well," she said, when I asked what was wrong with that, "writers are just sort of weird." But to her credit and my father's, they always supported my efforts, even as they advised me that I might want to consider a profession that would actually pay the bills.
As a kid I also wanted to be an astronaut and paleontologist (yes, I was a nerd before it was cool). Paleontologists don't live the high life either, I suspect, although I imagine astronauts do okay. In any event journalism—finally— pays the bills, more or less.
"Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it."
– Horace Greeley, noted newspaper editor and reformer
I'm one of those people that's a true jack of all trades. The older I get the more I realize that I'm not exceptionally brilliant at anything, but I can be reasonably competent at most things I set my mind to, and even really good at a few things. I get bored rather easily though, which probably is the under-lying reason for me being good at a lot of things but brilliant at nothing. This doesn't actually read like someone trying to convince you to hire them for a project does it?
Well, I can say that I write reasonably well—I can even turn a phrase with the best of 'em, when I'm in a groove—and I've got a fair variety of experience in the ole' journalism department. In the course of my career, I've covered everything from semiconductors and high-tech to medicine, the environment, college sports and city politics. I've shadowed a midwife as she made her rounds, helmed a U.S. Coast Guard ice breaker, rode shotgun in a C-130 military cargo plane, sat down to talk with former Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, and participated in live fire exercises with firefighters. I had a ring-side seat in 2001 when the technology Christians got thrown to Nasdaq lions at the hands of their Roman investors.
I've interviewed the CEO's of billion-dollar companies. I spent the entire month of October, 2005 running around China, investigating its electronics industry and culture, and blogging about the experience for Electronic News. And yes, before you ask, I ate a bunch of strange things, including dog—if you're going to do something, might as well go all out, I say). My journalism career has also taken me to Japan, Germany, France and Belgium at various times as well; I've successfully navigated the subways of Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo and San Francisco (one subway is pretty much like another, though). At various times I've worked as a bartender, roofer, personal trainer and raft guide (never got very good, but I never drowned anybody), and know a bit about cycling, rock climbing, hiking, backpacking and playing outside.
What else? I even—shudder—converted
to the Dark Side for a year and worked as a writer for the Galactic Empire in public relations and marketing. And thanks to my current employers, I now know more
about GPS technology than anyone outside of the GNSS industry has any
right to know.
So got something along any (or none) of those lines for me? Need a writer who can take his own pictures? Need a photographer who can write his own story? Need someone with an up-to-date passport who speaks garbled, rusty French or knows a few words in Japanese or Mandarin? Need someone that can conjugate a verb and understands why <div> tags are usually preferable to <td> tags—someone that's an Enlish geek and a computer nerd? I'm your guy.
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
– Thomas Jefferson