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I’m about to turn 50 any second. Many of us hide this fact from the public eye. But I don’t want to. Or rather I got over the feeling that I needed to a while back. All of a sudden it dawned on me that it didn’t matter. 50 is a number. A somewhat sobering number health and living wise but a number nonetheless. And considering I’ve outlived my mother by 11 years, it does give one pause.

I remember when I turned 40. I’d made it. I was for sure I wouldn’t. Mom always said she’d be 39 forever. She died 22 days before her 40th birthday.

I remember when I turned twenty-five. For some reason I thought 25 meant that I’d be taken more seriously, that I’d put enough time in on the planet not to be seen as just a kid. It’s funny, at 50, I’d rather be around smart 25-year-olds than people my own age. That’s one of the reasons I love the internet.

What’s good at fifty that wasn’t so good at 25?

I don’t drink anymore
I’ve been in a relationship for 21 years
I own my own house
I have a steady job
I can afford to buy any book I want, whenever I want and they’re more expensive now than then
I am calmer
I could care less what most people think

What’s different for you now that wasn’t true at some other point in your life?

Technorati Tags: autoethnography

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.

Technorati Tags: art, computers, Democratic-Christian ideals, germany, history, web 2.0

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.