Tuesday, November 04, 2003
My 34 years as a West Virginia Mountaineer have been lived in valleys. I spent the first seven years of my life in the Kanawha valley, then moved to the valley of the once great but now extinct Teays River. After I graduated from Winfield High School I did spend one year in the mountains at West Virginia Wesleyan College but transferred to Marshall University because at Wesleyan I was learning beyond my means. I lived in the Ohio valley in Huntington for 13 years.
I worked my way through school and am the first member of my family to earn a college degree. I have worked in funeral home, in a photo lab, as a grocery clerk, as a proofreader, and as a grass cutter for a marina where I became immune to poison ivy. My last job took me on the road Kerouac style--I led a team of corporate carny trash through the sprawl from Chicago to Youngstown, remodeling drugstores and trashing motel rooms all along the way. For those two years I worked up to 80-hour weeks as a temp in a manager's position for a company contracted to install a new floor plan of sales fixtures and inventory for a corporation that had just taken over an existing chain of drugstores. We were called Merchandisers; it was nuts; I quit--after lying in the belly of Detroit for two weeks, resetting trash and sandwich bag aisles and waiting for a new merchandising team and more drugstores. I now work for the __________________ (There is peace in the valley).
I have always been a reader and as I matured became fascinated with the structure of the works I read. That fascination developed into study and I began to experiment with writing--first poetry, then fiction and now I also work as a free-lance technical writer. A writer's job is the delivery of information. In my mind, a good novel is non-linear having many meta-levels (language, metaphor, character, dialog, setting, etc.) constructed to tell a story, present a theme, evoke different moods. In a way, a good novel is like a relational database. My work at the library is also concerned with the delivery of information but on a different level. I work on the records in our database that guide our patrons to specific works when they enter search keys from our web-based catalog. It's a no-brainer--I have to learn more about information systems.
I'm interested in both the technology and psychology of information. There are ethical challenges in the design of information systems that I feel need to be addressed and there are technical problems begging for reasoned, elegant solutions. While I am theoretically minded and view the program I am in at ___________ as more than a vocational school, I am also pragmatic and eager to learn the nuts and bolts of the technologies.
I worked my way through school and am the first member of my family to earn a college degree. I have worked in funeral home, in a photo lab, as a grocery clerk, as a proofreader, and as a grass cutter for a marina where I became immune to poison ivy. My last job took me on the road Kerouac style--I led a team of corporate carny trash through the sprawl from Chicago to Youngstown, remodeling drugstores and trashing motel rooms all along the way. For those two years I worked up to 80-hour weeks as a temp in a manager's position for a company contracted to install a new floor plan of sales fixtures and inventory for a corporation that had just taken over an existing chain of drugstores. We were called Merchandisers; it was nuts; I quit--after lying in the belly of Detroit for two weeks, resetting trash and sandwich bag aisles and waiting for a new merchandising team and more drugstores. I now work for the __________________ (There is peace in the valley).
I have always been a reader and as I matured became fascinated with the structure of the works I read. That fascination developed into study and I began to experiment with writing--first poetry, then fiction and now I also work as a free-lance technical writer. A writer's job is the delivery of information. In my mind, a good novel is non-linear having many meta-levels (language, metaphor, character, dialog, setting, etc.) constructed to tell a story, present a theme, evoke different moods. In a way, a good novel is like a relational database. My work at the library is also concerned with the delivery of information but on a different level. I work on the records in our database that guide our patrons to specific works when they enter search keys from our web-based catalog. It's a no-brainer--I have to learn more about information systems.
I'm interested in both the technology and psychology of information. There are ethical challenges in the design of information systems that I feel need to be addressed and there are technical problems begging for reasoned, elegant solutions. While I am theoretically minded and view the program I am in at ___________ as more than a vocational school, I am also pragmatic and eager to learn the nuts and bolts of the technologies.
