Category Archives: About

Why I Work for the Common Good

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The organization I work for has been making the news.  Not in a good way.

For the record, I live in the same house I’ve lived in since 2000, long before I went to work for SCAP, well in sight of the sewer treatment plant and near a recent sheriff involved homicide.  When I went to work for SCAP, I went to work for an ideal called the Continuum of Care.  I’ll talk about the CoC in my next post but for now I want to focus on why I work for the public.

Why do I work for the whole and not the part? Because everything is connected. It seems dead dumb stupid simple to me: Poison anywhere ends up in the drinking water.

A lot of people have the idea that life is all about money. Well, anyone who knows me knows that’s not the case with me. Everything for me is about the simple fact that we are human, creation is magnificent and we have brains and opposable thumbs. Those facts blow my fucking mind every day. There’s so much we can and could do. If only we would.

That commonality, those unique and amazing and incredible qualities and gifts of humanness, makes it so that it should be us against the elements; us against cancer and especially, us against our own stupidity and violence.  It should be us not me and mine.

And so I don’t focus much on what’s good for one–I try to focus on what is good for all, on those things we all share (which is pretty much everything) and how and in what ways we can bring more equity to pass.  I do not believe in the philosophy that it’s a dog-eat-dog world or that I should look out for number one.  I think we should look out for one another.  I do not believe that life is heartless and cold and vicious.  People can be but life is very giving and supportive.  Life has given me reasoning and strength and eyes to see.  Life gives me what I need: food and the ability to create the things I need to live.

It’s a complicated world we live in, these days. Rules and regulations have made it so no one is trusted and no one needs to tell the truth anymore.  Technicalities and the letter of the law will win out over what is right and good and moral and ethical almost every single time.  What can you do about that? Well, you can ask yourself that question. That’s a healthy start.

 

 

From SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

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. . . All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die . . . .

W.H. Auden

What do I do for a living?

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Anything that is interesting.

Primarily, I am a technician.
I enjoy parts and processes.

I’ve spent a big chunk of my life learning about “how things work” —from jet-propelled fighters to computers, non-profits and local government. For most of my life I’ve been curious to know how it all fits together (or doesn’t). As a kid I was constantly taking things apart, looking to see what was inside. To this day, I’ll dismantle anything but can’t promise to put it back together exactly the same way . . .

I’ve worked as an aircraft and hydraulics system mechanic, an office machine repair technician for Xerox, a pizza cook, and as a neighborhood tech support specialist. For a while, during the dotcom boom I had my own web design business. I’ve managed video projects for non-profits, built databases for the fun of imposing order on chaos and spent many hours in classrooms both as a student and as an instructor.

I can install and learn to use ANY piece of software available.

I’ve worked in a stained glass shop. I once spent 6 weeks underground, inside a dam, as an apprentice carpenter. I’ve crawled down the intake of an F-4 and taught college freshman composition.

I have worked from blueprints, drawings, sketches and verbal descriptions to create things of function and beauty.

I’ve worked in a ceramics studio, a hydraulics shop, a dam, a university and a community center. My experience is eclectic and colorful. And I wouldn’t trade it for a pension or a Lamborghini.

I’ve been an algebra tutor, a college English instructor, a stained glass window artist and a factory worker. I curated my own art exhibit at CSU Stanislaus called: From Pulp to Pixel.

I’ve final prepped computers for packaging, repaired broken electronic typewriters, corrected freshman compositions, facilitated discussions, created web graphics, installed Red Hat Linux, PHP and Apache, and I’ve been a crew chief on an RF-4C in Zweibrucken, Germany.

I’ve spent literally years reading. From comic books and Hardy Boys mysteries at 8 to semiotics as a graduate student I’ve read a little of nearly everything. I am constantly looking for information. Once I spent a year researching the field of community building. While in graduate school I read hundreds of books and articles relating to the writing process in anthropological fieldwork practices and the college classroom. The literature covered an area of inquiry that included discussions of methodological practice, the values and uses of narrative and qualitative writing. For a while I thought I might end up a philosopher but I couldn’t find work.

I am interested in how man thought during particular periods in history. I am drawn to the histories of science, anthropology, education and contemporary art through the 1960s. My mind is structured around semiotics, social construction, computer logic, Buddhism, Democratic-Christian ideals and Zen. Ideas enthrall me. Theory compels me. Conceptual thought sustains me. Sometimes I think I live in the question.

I learn through juxtaposition.

I resonate to the theory that man is a product of his environment. I believe that the most interesting issues, problems and challenges confronting us at this time don’t belong to any existing systems or academic discipline but instead live in a “space-between“. This is a subject I plan to elaborate on, in the near future, at another website.

In the meantime I am available to work on projects.

I’m familiar with and have used much of the major desktop software available including Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Pagemaker, Premiere and After Effects; Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and Flash; Linux, Macintosh and Windows operating systems; PHP and MySQL; a multitude of open source web application projects and programs; numerous utilities programs as well as groupware, mail, word processing, spreadsheet and database software such as Word and Excel as well as hundreds of Web 2.0 apps.

If you have something that you think I might find interesting drop me a line at seaelle [at] gmail [dot] com.

Who the Heck Am I?

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Well, I’ve been on the planet for a while. I’ve been around open source software for about a decade. I started learning about computers with a Timex Sinclair, a Commodore Pet and Radio Shack parts. I worked for a while for a company called Sirius Systems–they bought Victor Technologies (Victor Adding Machines) and then they tanked. Then I went to work for Xerox as a Field Service Tech during the era of the Memorywriter.

I’ve worked as a pizza cook, a barrister and a jet airplane mechanic. A hydraulics mechanic and as an assistant to a bunch of different artists.

I was in the Air Force. Had my own RF4C. I was it’s crew chief. The beginning of the movie, Top Gun shows you what my job was like. I was stationed in Zweibrucken, Germany and I’m ashamed to say I never learned to speak German. I did thoroughly enjoy the countryside, went on many, many volksmarches and loved, loved the swinging bar-b-ques over open fire pits. Oh, and of course drinking in the pubs, shots of apple schnapps, proasting and polka music.

I built my first website using Frontpage but quickly realized my error and switched to table-based design in Dreamweaver. Somewhere around the dot com crash I got tired of the hassle of web re-building and wandered away from web work and have recently (the last year or so) begun to come back in to see how much has really changed. (I’m not yet convinced much really has).

My formal education is extensive and eclectic but not hoity-toity. I’ve studied big A art, created some sculpture and assemblages, taught college level freshman composition and have worked in or around all three levels of government a lot of my life.

I am not a professional computer anything. I am not a professional anything though I do have a professional’s attitude in that you should always study your craft and do your best. I prefer to remain human rather than to become something, a name, a tag, a job and as a result I therefore don’t make very much money. I have too many interests and I’m just too curious to settle down into that “just one thing”.

I read like a carnivore eats.

I live in a county ghetto within the city limits of one of the US’s 100 most populated cities.

I can be a pain, usually not on purpose but as a result of having a plethora of ideas that I want to try to see if they work.

I used to believe in right and wrong but not in the same way as anyone else. And not in any way close to how my government currently frames those sorts of binaries.

I think that people should be nicer to each other but I realize we don’t very well know how, often don’t want to and sometimes don’t even understand why that might be a a good idea. Therefore I don’t believe we ever will be nice to each other but that every now and again we get tired of being mean.

I love the web. It’s an incredible and amazing new frontier. I think that the best people on the planet live on it. I wish that it did not disappear when I turn off my computer. I dream of the day when the web in built into my house, when there are screens all around my house and I can live inside of it.

Want more? Stay tuned.