As a graduating student, you are to construct a portfolio. Your portfolio should include 5-7 double-spaced pages (Does not include title page, table of content, and bibliography). The primary audience for your portfolio is your 490 professor. Below is the direction.
1) Title page and Annotated Table of Contents.
The title page should include your name, major, email address and date of submission. The Table of Contents should communicate careful and logical organization and enable readers to find materials easily.
2) List of all courses you have taken/are currently taking.
This should be organized in the following manner:
Area I: UWM Distribution Requirements — General Education
Area II: BSIR Core Courses
Area III: BSIR Cross-functional Electives
Area IV: General Electives, including Cognate Areas of Study
3) You as a learner
Using specific details and with reference to a variety of texts and experiences, you are to examine your educational experience as a college student and to create a meaningful statement of your learning. In particular you are asked to discuss how your learning is integrative and to discuss work in your concentration.
In this section you need to address these questions:
(1) how have you developed as a learner/thinker;
(2) What have you learned in BSIR major; and
(3) how has your experience been integrative (Integrative: What connections or contrasts have you found among and between ideas and experiences in your learning communities, courses, and experiential learning, etc.?)
4) Discuss competencies pertinent to your BSIR major and/or experience
You are to select 4 competencies that are especially important to you. Define each competency and explain how the competency is relevant to your major or experience. You may want to discuss some of the specific skills and abilities that make up each competency.
5) Future directions
This section should include the following components:
(1) a statement of approximately 2 paragraphs explaining your degree program in integrative studies.
(2) Your updated resume, carefully written and designed, accompanied by a brief statement explaining the target audience for which you have shaped this particular version of your resume.
(3) Statement of career and personal goals as you see them currently.
(4) Future learning in a competency area. Questions you might consider:
((A) What are some of your learning goals, short-term and longer-term?
((B) What are your current goals for graduate school or career?
((C) What are some personal goals (for example, goals connected to travel or to competencies such as effective citizenship, global perspective or valuing)?
6) Bibliography
In your essays, you will need to refer specifically to sources such as books, journal articles, lecture notes, etc. Please be sure to cite these in appropriate format.
OBJECTIVE – I am primarily interested in working for the common good, and towards a just and sustainable future. My ideal position would utilize my facility for, and enjoyment of, working with & serving others, researching & structuring information, design, teaching, a user’s perspective, creating tutorials & S.O.P. checklists, and the joy I take in talking to people about the things that really matter to them.
WORK EXPERIENCE:
Self Employed 1990 – Present Allness Unlimited
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and other creative pursuits.
Webmaster 04/2004 – 09/2006 UCSB Milwaukee, WI
Maintaining and updating the web publication, Himalayan Linguistics Journal for the Linguistics Departments of UCSB and UWM.
Instructor’s Assistant Spring Semester 2004 UWM Milwaukee, WI
Research and paperwork for a School of Information Studies instructor.
Water Treatment 6/00 – 1/01 Institech / ITU New Berlin, WI
Waste water flotation treatment and recycling operation, forklift certification, maintenance, some welding.
Bartender 12/01-2/02 Clique Soul Club Milwaukee, WI
01/01-9/01 Shanahan’s Irish Pub Milwaukee, WI
Injection Mold Setup 6/99 -12/99 Interplas Ltd. Menomonee Falls, WI
Mold Set-up: Setting and pulling small quick-change molds, process troubleshooting, repair and maintenance of water thermal regulation systems.
9/98-9/99 Generation 2 Plastics Milwaukee, WI
Setting molds, some fabrication and maintenance, supervising second shift production, production reports, creating process S.O.P. checklists, W-2 client training in mold operation and inspection. Audits. Recycled polypropylene material extrusion. Melt flow tests. Densification. Forklift. Materials blending and sorting.
EDUCATION:
2007 University Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI
Information and Library Science
2000 Wisconsin Bartending College Milwaukee, WI
Bar Tending
1985-1988 University of Wisconsin Madison, WI
History, Anthropology, Political Science
1984-1985 Academy Of Health Science/National Guard San Antonio, TX
Basic Medical Laboratory 92B BML10
RECENT VOLUNTEERISM:
Milwaukee Area Green Party – 1998-2007, Co-ordinating Council member for 5 years
WI Green Party – 2003-Present, Co-ordinating Council Rep for the 4th, 5th, and 3rd Cong. Districts since 2003
US Green Party – 2004-Present, National Committee Rep for the 3rd Congressional District since 2007
Feed the Need Necedah and NecedahHarvest.org – 2008-Present, Steering committee, Webmaster, and Activist, for local food security and buy local efforts
INTERESTS:
Joomla & Drupal CMS, all sciences, reading, history, aquaria, art painting, computers, infognostics, interdisciplinary fields of study generally, especially Archeaology, and new paradigms of connectivity.
The reverence of Allness through seeking sustainability and grace in human affairs is essential in all I do.
References:
RECENT SUPERVISORS:
Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of English UWM
Wooseob Jeong, Assistant Professor, UWM SOIS
ACADEMIC:
Johannes Britz, D.D., D. Phil., Dean & Professor UWM SOIS
Jacques du Plessis, Professor UWM SOIS
Pa Moua (Paj Muas), ME-PD, Student Adviser
FRIENDS:
Mark E Sarvela, Program Evaluation Manager Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, DHFS – DCFS
Gregory H. Bartz, NASA Flight Management Subcontractor
Anna R. Olson, Creative Director, Cream City Ribbon
Literature and Politics: Religious & Moral Perspectives of the 19th & 20th Centuries
3
:
ILS 202
BC
Integrated Liberal Studies; Western Culture: History of Science, Technology, & Philosophy II
3
TRAN-L&S XS
:
LIT TRAN 262
B
Survey Of Chinese Literature
3
COMPLIT X 3.00
AFROAMER 277
B
Africa: An Introductory Survey
4
AFRICOL 232
E ASIAN 240
A
Introduction to the I-Ching: Book Of Change
2
TRAN-L&S
PHILOS 204
B+
Introduction to Asian Religions
3
:
SPANISH 101
F
First Year Spanish
0
SPANISH 103
Course Topic(s): Chinese Calligraphy
PEACEST 201
Introduction to Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution
3
2003-05-28 Deans Honor List
2004-01-06 Deans Honor List
My Learning Prior to SOIS at UWM:
My concentration has been on political science and studies of cultures.
There have been many opportunities for me to integrate my focus on the needs of citizens, whilst pursuing my SOIS studies.
Within SOIS I have focused a few graduate courses on library science, so one could easily say I have concentrated on the citizen need for information resources and how it can best be filled with our current capabilities. I have focused much study on the optimal future development of information resources for public use into the future.
There are several competencies that it has served me well to study; many of the most useful come from the second half of my academic career, when I’ve studied IR at UWM SOIS. The foundation upon which that course of study was laid was half a lifetime’s self directed study on the historical issues of the people in politics, and the possibilities that our technical development can and does open up for a more human future. The core of this study is the first half of my academic career; I particularly was left an impression on by a handful of these classes. Although the mists of time deprive me of much detail, I will start with the classes from my classic liberal arts / humanities phase.
First chapter highlights start with Ancient Cities of the Americas, Anthro 22. Although I can’t remember the professor’s name, he was a giant in his field and had been in charge of the digs at Teotehuacan and Cahokia, each for extended critical periods of time. He taught no more soon after that (1985), and was so old he was difficult to hear, but he put me on to a very important concept that is still having a hard time being accepted as the new paradigm. He told me, in trying to make sense of some details, or another, that there was much circumstantial evidence for many ancient American cities that tells a similar tale.
These city states all developed very complex hierarchies. These tended to grow over time, and eventually become too large and top heavy to be supported by those below. At this point they would eat up all their reserves, and hinterlands. Then when nothing could keep it working, the culture would collapse completely. As there would be no food anywhere nearby, the entire culture of that place would disappear, and the survivors would simply found a new, more egalitarian way of life somewhere else. He was quite convincing with this case using Cahokia, where he was the prominent expert in the field, and the evidence is quite strong now that this was the case. The Teotehuacan hierarchy may have survived somewhat transmuted as the Aztec, or some other aristocracy, its case is not so cut and dried. He hinted that the Maya may also prove to be a similar case, and since he has left us, the case has become pretty solid that the Maya just threw the culture away but are still using many of the same walled orchards, built long ago, today.
This gives me much hope, for I saw us as more like the Cahokian model, but without the ability to escape back to the hinterland and the wilderness. Our culture is so profoundly large, and impacts this planet so universally, that this class helped me see another way that we are meeting a grave new challenge never seen before. Next social collapse, there will be nowhere to leave to. This paradigm also pointed out the degree to which our culture has a built in addiction to frontiers, and that the frontier of human endeavor had transformed historically with the close the physical frontier of earth’s lands.
This lesson was bolstered by my simultaneously taking Anthro 101, and was thrown in sharp contrast by Intro to International Relations (the other IR), Poli Sci 175. A professor whose name I prefer to forget thought that the concept of hegemony was deep, and important, and the greatest thing since sliced bread. I may have been more inclined to agree with him were his intent to teaching hegemony less akin to Kissinger’s intent in practicing it. This semester is when I discovered my true enemy was hierarchal socio-political power, not the hierarchy itself, but the concept of its legitimacy.
So that was my first semester at UWM, formative. Then I went to Madison.
There were four courses that had a great impact on me individually, and one semester when three courses combined to cover the three sides of the golden triangle. These all were part of my focus on the political history of the peoples of our world.
The two most important of these seven were focused on biology and the history of science.
The first of the four was Poli Sci 209, Issues in Political Thought. The issue for the semester was the history of words used to identify political ideologies. In this class I came to understand that disparate modern ideologies had all started as something that I believed in strongly, but that over time the vagaries of political power had twisted the discourse until it was impossible to use these words to have meaningful discussion of the concepts that they represent. This is because they each have so many different meanings to different people. It helped me understand how skewed modern American political discourse is, and why it is so difficult to discuss politics meaningfully in the US. This formed the basis of my ability to define my very simple anarkic beliefs, regardless of my audiences’ understanding of ideological terms.
The theme of Chinese, and Asian religious cultures, that also spanned these years, contributed much to my ability to discuss my spiritual beliefs, which were emerging from my atheism at the same time.
The other Poli Sci course that had great impact was Poli Sci 654, Politics of Revolution. I’d always wanted to see myself as a revolutionary, this course helped me sort thru what is wrong and what is right with the revolutions that have occurred so far. One of the best parts of it was that we looked closely at what causes revolution; what factors were always present, and which, not being present, prevent effective change regardless of the need. The perception of the possibility of positive change appears to be the most important predisposition towards people changing their world. This concept has had a profound impact on me and it has grown stronger and more refined over time.
Two science courses had a profound impact on me in ways that go beyond science to political and spiritual understandings that have remained important to me. The prior semester had laid some foundations for this. Three classes covered different sides of the infamous golden triangle at the same time; this really helped me achieve a good overview of modern western history. Poli Sci 260, Intro to Latin America, and Afroamer 277 Intro to Africa really helped me understand how eurocentric culture has in fact created underdevelopment, and that it is sustained by the state department and other institutions that have inherited the mantle of the wealth and power of the eurocentric economic worldview. The other class I had that semester is hard to describe, for it was an interdisciplinary look at the evolution of western culture, science, technology, and philosophy. Integrated Liberal Studies 202 II was full of expansive ideas and charted the interrelation of what we see as different fields of study, and how they have become fragmented over time. All three of these classes spent the same two weeks on the period of the golden triangle. At the end of this time I realized that I had acquired a quite a broad and comprehensive view of western history, from within it’s philosophical core, and in it’s context of other cultures.
The take home lesson for this semester: when an ancient Greek used the word teknos, he was discussing not only how, and with what, but also why. We have divorced our reason from itself; we do not ask why we design science, technology, and philosophy. They have all become ancillaries to earning money, which motive is unquestioned. That this is the essential goal of our culture (earning more money for/by those who already have much of it), and our biggest barrier to good politics, science, and technology, was beginning to become apparent to me, but it was the history of science that straightened me out for good. I clearly remember History of Science 101, but my transfer transcripts contain no reference to it. It was near the end of this class, which was a broad overview of the rise of modern science over the last few centuries, that I realized that a good portion of the technical difficulties we are having with survival on earth has come from a changing of the priorities and motives for science, research, and technical development over the years.
What originally was a grand enterprise to improve the human condition and grow closer to God by understanding his world better has become mainly harnessed to the capitalist profit motive. There are many small reasons for this, and collectively they are quite substantial. This changed my core understanding, until then I saw all political problems as essentially being solvable by technical solutions.
Now I see that all technical problems require political solutions.
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies:
This brings me to the second half of my course work, a focus on the teknos of solutions to political problems. Entering the SOIS, I had the advantage of seeing technology not as object, but as process implying a purpose. I also had the advantage of knowing the power of information and knowledge to transform our world, as well as knowing the importance information access for everyone has to the world. Though I could only see at the time that I would rather study information use generally than any given field, I have found in IR studies the answers the first half of my studies had sent me looking for.
I felt simultaneously well updated and at home in my first semester back at UWM, in the IR program at SOIS. In L&I SCI 632 and L&I SCI 110 there was much discussion about the ethics of information use. We covered the need for intellectual property security, and the digital divide. These discussions helped bring my focus on socio-political issue back into focus. Class discussion in these classes did more to help me comprehend the current state of these issues more than any other materials could have. These two classes rounded out the competency I brought back to school with me. This is a basic, broad humanities background with a view of the context of our past, but a focus on current and future needs. I have rounded out this competency with the addition of PEACEST 201, Intro to Conflict Resolution, we studied conflict and it’s resolution. There was a real relevance here in that the digital divide and the information economy were important topics of the class. William Ury’s “Getting to Peace” was an excellent text that put a larger context to our cultural development. His essential argument was that we have returned to the expandable economic pie of our ancestors who were hunter-gatherers as a result of the knowledge economy. He places blame for violence amongst humans largely on the limited economic resources of the agricultural revolution. Like a hunter gather economy, but more so, the resources that matter in the knowledge revolution expand when shared, instead of shrinking like land and water do when shared. Ury is famous for his work as a corporate consultant and mediator. This socio-economic competence is formative and central to me. There are three other competencies that I value very much, it is easier to discuss them while discussing the second half of my course work, which is mostly in IR. In a word each: research, project management, and web implementation. My preexisting artistic bent has enjoyed flourishing particularly in web implementation and design.
The core competency that I value having expanded in SOIS, is the ability to do research. In L&I Sci. 210, Foundations of University Library Research, I learned how to research and document a good college paper. I had acquired a pretty good sense for how to write a paper, but this course covers material every student should know about how to use reference materials better to do research and to document it.
In L&I SCI 330, Electronic Info Retrieval, and L&I SCI 510, Intro to Reference Services and Resources, my ability to do research was expanded and solidified. The ability to find the information one needs is the most important skill today in my opinion. In all three of these course’s, databases, the Internet, and practice, were far more powerful than any books that could have been assigned. The familiarity I gained with the use of a reference library is invaluable to me, and was given uncommon depth, for a baccalaureate, by the addition of L&I SCI 681, Using Archives: The Value of Primary Sources in the Information Age. This course is about managing and organizing archives. One of its focuses was about basic marketing issues, this helped complete the course of thought began with L&I SCI 640, Information Marketing. This class was primarily about marketing information; the focus was on marketing free library resources to the public in an information economy. As this course was one of my first IR courses, it set a course of questioning that I followed throughout these following courses, comprising what I call the engineering, or development, competency.
One of the few courses that had books that I thought were instrumental to me was, L&I SCI 310, Human Factors of Info Seeking and Use. This course was essentially a study of usability. As someone who has an interest in universal info access, it was very instructive to study the methods of measuring and ameliorating usability problems. There were two books in this class that left an impression on me. The first was “Don’t Make Me Think”, almost a new type of book, being easy to skim and navigate; it was the best example I’ve ever seen for Steve Krug’s points about web design in book form. Donald Norman’s “Things that Make Us Smart” was all about how the focus of the information technology should be on conforming it to human needs, as opposed to the recent historical trend of adapting human behavior to the machines. To function, the knowledge economy technology needs to make us smarter. Tools that are not easily handled by the human mind don’t makes us smart as effectively.
To further bolster this engineering, or product development, focus, it was instructive to have three other courses in addition. L&I SCI 250, Internet Planning & Implementation, taught me how to build an enterprise scale intranet, and introduced the concept of project management, and working in groups. PM techniques were expanded upon and given depth and context in L&I SCI 340, Information Architecture II. Here we learned about basic PM tools and techniques. This was a good course for understanding information projects in the context of a modern corporate culture that is aware of the need for good project management. In L&I SCI 490, Senior Capstone, we put PM methods and tools into use in a group project of design and implementation of a scripted website.
The capstone class also capped off experience and formal study in the remaining competency, interactive web design and implementation. This is the competency that I most enjoy exercising and learning, because it satisfies my creative and artistic self. In L&S 110, we were introduced to HTML markup. I was delighted to design my first web page in this class, and this carried over into L&I SCI 240, Information Architecture I, where we learned a lot about HTML and learned some JavaScript as well. We also learned about CSS and other kinds of templates. L&I SCI 440, Information Architecture III, expanded this scripting background; we designed ASP and PHP interactive web applications that worked with databases. There were several good texts covered in these courses, but the best sources were web based, like Webmonkey.com, and W3C pages.
Future Directions:
Designing web implementations gave me ideas that may bring all these competencies back together. I am working out some ideas I have for how web applications can be used to automate some of the work of group self governance. On the surface the concept is no more than a survey, but it is hyper survey. A web application could make it much easier, and more democratic, to share opinions and decisions. Just for beginners, we could rank the questions to order them by value, and share each other’s answers. Most important, the web environment will enable more ease of rewording of proposed questions and the posting new questions by participants. All in all, there is much room to improve communication, expression, and decisions, on political matters in the online environment. There are security issues that I find hard to solve simply, without the use of nominal Paypal payments, or some other such conceptually inappropriate use, but they are not intractable to a fair solution, and new solutions will arise organically.
A similar idea is to use cooperative effort to compile useful link lists to serve the peoples’ expanding need for coherence in the flood of data. A multi-axis system of categories and rankings could be combined with user inputs and valuations. This could enable the finding, and listing, of links in a number of different criteria simultaneously, with a ranking along a spectrum of each criterion. In this way one could search for just the right level of knowledge at the intersection of several interests. Some of these axes (political radicalism, or left-right spectrum, as opposed to the freedom-safety spectrum, or scientific radical-conservative spectrum) would be more subjective and geared towards values, trust, and taste. XML, which was the topic of my independent study, L&I SCI 399, is a markup that would make a good platform core for these types of applications.
My focus on universal empowerment through knowledge access has been brought much empowerment itself, in the form of these three other competencies. Research, product development, and web implementation, are well bundled here to perform the job I have assigned myself. It is my job to help all I can to ensure that these possibilities are used to help us all, for our boat is now to small for us to survive historic levels of collective individual selfishness. The new frontier is knowledge automation, but good results there are right next door to everyone, truly this is a new kind of new frontier. Clearly this frontier is in many ways the most open ever in terms of possibilities. I have confidence in our ability to build a sustainable knowledge economy, for the possibilities are limited only by our imagination. Yet I am concerned, for Politics of Revolution has taught me that we will not change our ways unless we perceive that we are able, and there is much in our socio-economic system that argues that we are helpless before it. We are not, however, helpless before it, it is we. Whether we know, or care, or not, every one of us changes and defines our culture, every day.
Currently I see my future in self employment as a webmaster while also working in the non-profit sector and/or knowledge industry. It is my dream to work with the national Green Party web team while working for Google. In both cases I would seek to work on ideas like the two cited above. Ultimately I would like to work in consulting and as a webmaster, while creating a game site out of the Science Fiction Utopian novel I’ve been working on. I would like to find a way to express my artistic urges in the meantime, so I am thinking about studies in computer imagery. In the meantime I intend to spend my summer learning Macromedia.
Download Academic Portfolio 2005 as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.
Primary interest is working for the common good towards a just and sustainable future.
Ideal position would utilize facility for, and joy taken in, working with & serving others, researching & structuring information, design, teaching, consideration of a user’s perspective, creating tutorials & S.O.P. checklists, and talking to people about the things that matter to them (that particular bouquet, of course, is unlikely).
WORK EXPERIENCE
Self Employed 1990 – Present Allness Unlimited
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and other creative pursuits.
Webmaster 04/2004 – 09/2006 UCSB Milwaukee, WI
Maintaining and updating the web publication, Himalayan Linguistics Journal for the Linguistics Departments of UCSB and UWM.
Instructor’s Assistant Spring Semester 2004 UWM Milwaukee, WI
Research and paperwork for a School of Information Studies instructor.
Water Treatment 6/00 – 1/01 Institech / ITU New Berlin, WI
Waste water flotation treatment and recycling operation, forklift certification, maintenance, some welding.
Bartender 12/01-2/02 Clique Soul Club Milwaukee, WI
Bartender 01/01-9/01 Shanahan’s Irish Pub Milwaukee, WI
Injection Mold Setup 6/99 -12/99 Interplas Ltd. Menomonee Falls, WI
Mold Set-up: Setting and pulling small quick-change molds, process troubleshooting, repair and maintenance of water thermal regulation systems.
Injection Mold Setup 9/98-9/99 Generation 2 Plastics Milwaukee, WI
Setting molds, some fabrication and maintenance, supervising second shift production, production reports, creating process S.O.P. checklists, W-2 client training in mold operation and inspection. Audits. Recycled polypropylene material extrusion. Melt flow tests. Densification. Forklift. Materials blending and sorting.
EDUCATION
2007 University Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI
Information and Library Science
2000 Wisconsin Bartending College Milwaukee, WI
Bar Tending
1985-1988 University of Wisconsin Madison, WI
History, Anthropology, Political Science
1984-1985 Academy Of Health Science/National Guard San Antonio, TX
Basic Medical Laboratory 92B BML10
RECENT VOLUNTEERISM
Milwaukee Area Green Party – 1998-2007, Co-ordinating Council member for 5 years
WI Green Party – 2003-Present, Co-ordinating Council Rep for the 4th, 5th, and 3rd Cong. Districts since 2003
US Green Party – 2004-Present, National Committee Rep for the 3rd Congressional District since 2007
Feed the Need Necedah and NecedahHarvest.org – 2008-Present, Steering committee, Webmaster, and Activist, for local food security and buy local efforts
INTERESTS
Applied tertiary and secondary research, animation, Joomla & Drupal CMS, graphic & web design, all sciences, history, aquaria, art painting, computers, infognostics, automation, collaborative self governance, archives, reading, materials, biochemistry, music, interdisciplinary fields of study generally, especially Archeaology, and new paradigms of connectivity.
Reverence of Allness by seeking to sustain grace in human affairs is the essence of all acts that matter.
REFERENCES
Recent Supervisors:
Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of English UWM
Wooseob Jeong, Assistant Professor, UWM SOIS
Academic:
Johannes Britz, D.D., D. Phil., Dean & Professor UWM SOIS
Jacques du Plessis, Professor UWM SOIS
Pa Moua (Paj Muas), ME-PD, Student Adviser
Friends:
Mark E Sarvela, Program Evaluation Manager, Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare; DHFS – DCFS
Gregory H. Bartz, NASA Flight Management Subcontractor
Anna R. Olson, Creative Director, Cream City Ribbon
Contact information on request from geanark@gmail.com
I love being part of a team helping people. I like to learn. I want to learn more about animation, Drupal, Spanish, Dreamweaver, PHP, and all sciences and technology. I am very skilled at online research and am familiar with most computer user habits at most skill levels. I want to help make the information economy more accessible, friendly, knowledgeable, and diverse. Anything you do, can be done meta. Whatever you need done, I can learn about it, and how to research it, and find a way to make it easier to learn or do.
I am particularly interested in organizations, goods, and services that benefit the common good, particularly those marginalized by historical structures of institutions and culture. I like people, and I like working with, and serving, others.
I am always interested to know more about the overarching conceptual structure of knowledge, the development of new theories and methods for seeking better tools and paradigms to organize our understandings and our efforts. The development of theory, spirit, and paradigm, are of great interest to me, as is also the development of new toolage and method, how we each use these, and how they could be better understood, organized, or made available to create ease of use, productivity, and consensus. I enjoy learning new information, concepts, and skills, particularly using these to improve methods of learning and creating, to make any part of it all easier and more fun to use and share, for more and more people, to the benefit of all.
I hope to start a new career in enabling social, environmental, and/or information systems work. I would like to be learning more about Drupal, Spanish, LINUX and Chinese, and have begun working more in PHP and Macromedia. I have always loved painting and design, and I am working on a freeware project CD/site to enable free self help for Windows users. I have learned to love creating tutorials on rudimentary use of programming, web design, and self help, and have recently graduated my tech support skills to pro, as I’m at the point where it is not just bailing out those who love me, but also those nice people who I only know because paid me to come over and fix problems and explain how to avoid them.
No matter where my career may go, it is very likely that many of these pursuits will continue only on my own time. The information I find most interesting is inevitably that which I am using the most. It would be great if any of my recent interests were a good fit for my new career, but the career I really seek is one helping empower and bring together people and/or other beings with information. My
Breif History:
Soon after high school, I joined the National Guard, to train as a medical laboratory technician, and get help for paying for UW. I should have known, Army financing made it even harder to pay for school at UW. After working at many tasks, I eventually became an injection mold setup technician in the 90′s, and then a bartender, but my needs to create value, learn, share, and be creative, were not at all met by either task. My job as a waste-water floatation separation technician had taught me the feeling of creating real social and environmental value, as a bartender I could enjoy the sharing of information, services, and goods, but neither kind of work satisfied my deep seated need to enquire, learn, teach, and share information, knowledge, and wisdom. Eventually I was able to go back to UWM with help from my family, and am now about to graduate from UWM SOIS, with a BSIR.
My Degree:
My studies have attempted to cover the breadth of the development and structure of understanding generally and the way different approaches and understandings can come together to further our vision of ourselves, our surroundings, and the constraints of the material and social world, about as well as an undergraduate degree may. I am especially interested in which of these are things we can change for the better, and how would it make best sense to do so. I have remained somewhat weak in math, programming, languages, and business, much of what I know about science and art is self taught, but I have studied each of these enough to augment my core competency, which is how these are all connected in their past, future, and current development.
My Culture:
The national cultures I have the most respect for are those of Americas’ first nations and the Chinese nations. Tibetan, south Asian, and African nation cultures also inspire me a great deal. I feel I am an internationalist, even though I really only know English, and have never really left the US. I feel meta to our cultures, I am native to none, and to all.
My Religion:
I have few spiritual convictions, but those I have are deeply considered, and constitute my own religion of one member, seeking unity with All. I believe Allness composes us all, the unity of all is the most powerful fact of existence, as obvious as is the liberty of the one, in all our multiple forms of interdependance.
I do not believe in the divisions some make between the spiritual and the material, nor those between sentience and material; wisdom, the All, the one, the information, the emotion, the spirit, the rays, particles, and fields composed of space and time, are all one unified whole, and are each composed of all the others.
I feel the opposite of good is not evil, but stupid, and that we are each free to define good, especially as it strengthens the good of all, and fits within a reasonably consensual mind-frame. The divisions humans make between peoples and beings are not good. As with the idea of evil, there may well have been a time when such divisions served the reverence and health of the diversity of the All, and all the people, but it is no longer. I deny all divisions between any one as illusion, and seek the underlying themes of being creation, to me the spirit of Allness is the penultimate state and authority.
I am at core firmly a materialist. I feel that all the pieces have the same authority of existence, and are all composed of the same degree of veracity and illusion, the particle, the ray, the field, the spirit, the love, the beauty, the information, the knowledge, the wisdom, the motion, the stillness, all composed of each other in one grand pageant of dance, being, work, song, life, and growth. Gravity is Goddess’s Love, keeping us from the cold unlike of thin space, but only just. We must each and every one struggle towards the collective end. Whether we can see the beauty of the purpose or not, whether we perceive success, or not, we are all in the act of composing the Allness, the one, or the feedback among every.
This is your after-death. All things, here, now, always. Whether or not she that transcends and embodies all space and time has yet to fully evolve, when she does, she’ll be here now, and we each will be a part of her being becoming. Our Earth-Mother needs us to have wisdom now to ensure she can sustain us. If we cannot, she will still go on to evolve towards blooming the love, light, and organization of life’s continuing evolution of complexity across our galaxy. Even a major asteroid, or the un-postpone-able red giant our sun will become, may only delay and spread her, spreading her seeds to a new fertile berth.
My Philosophy:
We must be ready to love and act with great courage to out evolve human consequences.
Personnel Committee
Peace Action Wisconsin
1001 E. Keefe Ave.
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Re: Office Manager
Esteemed Committee Being,
I was very pleased to see the email announcing the opening of the office manager position. I feel both that I am an excellent candidate for the position and that it is an excellent fit for my own professional growth and fulfilment.
I have theoretical training in the structure of databases and am familiar with spreadsheets, databases, and web based data structuring, but am inexperienced in accounting. I am, however, confident in my math skills, my ability to learn quickly, and my ability to teach myself on line. I grew up in a family business household, working in the fund raising sector, and have close friends with whom I discuss spreadsheets and other such instruments, so I am aware of many of the concepts behind bookkeeping.
An inveterate learner of everything, I always learn more about whatever it is I am doing. Working for peace is something I’ve been studying and doing all of my adult life. I would love to have more opportunities to focus upon it.
As someone with an often unique perspective on things, I am used to putting consensus between others ahead of my personal feelings. Regardless of the institution I’m working within, compromise is the soul of politics. I enjoy looking at both sides of an argument until we all can find the most solid common ground.
In many contexts I have discovered that I enjoy serving others, working with others, and working with the public. As I have yet to be employed in a context where I enjoy both serving well, and working with, the public, I look forward to meeting with you to discuss my fitness for this position, and thank you kindly for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Monte N. Letourneau
(also found below, or download it as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.)
Objectives
Work Experience
Education
Volunteerism
Interests
References
Website Portfolio
Business & E-Commerce Sites I have Designed
Social Web & Social Bookmarking Applications
Joomla, Templates, Drupal, & CMS
Hand Coded HTML
Art Portfolio
GIF Animations
Paintings
Renderings
Sculpture
Academic Portfolio / CV
(also found below, or download it as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.)
List of My Courses
About My Courses Before Returning to UWM
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies
Future Directions
About Me
What is Meta?
About BSIR SOIS UWM
What is Technologia?
What is InfoGnosis?
Capstone Assignment to Create Portfolio
My MySpace Profile
My Facebook Profile
My LinkedIn Profile
My Twitter Profile
Cover Letters:
JoomlAssist Proposal
Green Party US Fund Raising Assistant
Indian Community School of Milwaukee
Peace Action Wisconsin
RESUME:
Monte Letourneau
N14466 n20th Avenue
Necedah, WI 54646
geanark@gmail.com
608-565-3516
http://montesite.net
OBJECTIVE – I am primarily interested in working for the common good, and towards a just and sustainable future. My ideal position would utilize my facility for, and enjoyment of, working with & serving others, researching & structuring information, design, teaching, a user’s perspective, creating tutorials & S.O.P. checklists, and the joy I take in talking to people about the things that really matter to them.
WORK EXPERIENCE:
Self Employed 1990 – Present Allness Unlimited
Web design and site maintenance, structural painting and restoration, woodworking, arts, crafts, jewelry, and other creative pursuits.
Webmaster 04/2004 – 09/2006 UCSB Milwaukee, WI
Maintaining and updating the web publication, Himalayan Linguistics Journal for the Linguistics Departments of UCSB and UWM.
Instructor’s Assistant Spring Semester 2004 UWM Milwaukee, WI
Research and paperwork for a School of Information Studies instructor.
Water Treatment 6/00 – 1/01 Institech / ITU New Berlin, WI
Waste water flotation treatment and recycling operation, forklift certification, maintenance, some welding.
Bartender 12/01-2/02 Clique Soul Club Milwaukee, WI
01/01-9/01 Shanahan’s Irish Pub Milwaukee, WI
Injection Mold Setup 6/99 -12/99 Interplas Ltd. Menomonee Falls, WI
Mold Set-up: Setting and pulling small quick-change molds, process troubleshooting, repair and maintenance of water thermal regulation systems.
9/98-9/99 Generation 2 Plastics Milwaukee, WI
Setting molds, some fabrication and maintenance, supervising second shift production, production reports, creating process S.O.P. checklists, W-2 client training in mold operation and inspection. Audits. Recycled polypropylene material extrusion. Melt flow tests. Densification. Forklift. Materials blending and sorting.
EDUCATION:
2007 University Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI
Information and Library Science
2000 Wisconsin Bartending College Milwaukee, WI
Bar Tending
1985-1988 University of Wisconsin Madison, WI
History, Anthropology, Political Science
1984-1985 Academy Of Health Science/National Guard San Antonio, TX
Basic Medical Laboratory 92B BML10
RECENT VOLUNTEERISM:
Milwaukee Area Green Party – 1998-2007, Co-ordinating Council member for 5 years
WI Green Party – 2003-Present, Co-ordinating Council Rep for the 4th, 5th, and 3rd Cong. Districts since 2003
US Green Party – 2004-Present, National Committee Rep for the 3rd Congressional District since 2007
Feed the Need Necedah and NecedahHarvest.org – 2008-Present, Steering committee, Webmaster, and Activist, for local food security and buy local efforts
INTERESTS:
Joomla & Drupal CMS, all sciences, reading, history, aquaria, art painting, computers, infognostics, interdisciplinary fields of study generally, especially Archeaology, and new paradigms of connectivity.
The reverence of Allness through seeking sustainability and grace in human affairs is essential in all I do.
References:
RECENT SUPERVISORS:
Michael Noonan, Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of English UWM
Wooseob Jeong, Assistant Professor, UWM SOIS
ACADEMIC:
Johannes Britz, D.D., D. Phil., Dean & Professor UWM SOIS
Jacques du Plessis, Professor UWM SOIS
Pa Moua (Paj Muas), ME-PD, Student Adviser
FRIENDS:
Mark E Sarvela, Program Evaluation Manager Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, DHFS – DCFS
Gregory H. Bartz, NASA Flight Management Subcontractor
Anna R. Olson, Creative Director, Cream City Ribbon
Contact information on request at geanark@gmail.com
Download Resume as: .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.
Academic Portfolio
Monte Letourneau
May 20, 2005
Table of contents:
List of My Courses
About My Courses Before Returning to UWM
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies
Future Directions
List of My Courses:
Course Grade Description Credits Transfered As
Area I
E ASIAN 101 D First Semester Chinese 6 LINGUIS 121
COMP LIT 288 AB Masterpieces of Literature For Honors II 3 COMPLIT 208
LINGUIS 200 A- Aspects of Language 3 :
ANTHRO 101 A- Introduction to Anthro-Human Prehistory 3 :
POL SCI 175 B+ Introduction to International Relations 3 :
WL ECOL 360 B Extinction Of Species 3 BIO SCI XN
ZOOLOGY 120 BC Biolocical Principles and their Impact On Society 3 BIO SCI 103
Area II
L&I SCI 632 A Microcomputer-Information Resources Management 3
L&I SCI 110 A Introduction to Information Science 3
L&I SCI 210 A- Foundations of University Library Research 3 :
L&I SCI 230 A Organization of Knowledge 3 :
L&I SCI 250 A Internet Planning & Implementation 3 :
L&I SCI 330 Electronic Information Retrieval 3 :
L&I SCI 410 Database Information Retrieval Systems 3 :
L&I SCI 430 Multimedia Application Developement 3 :
L&I SCI 490 Senior Capstone; DVD Site Project Management & this document 3 :
Area III
Business:
L&I SCI 640 A- Information Marketing 3 :
Area IV
L&I SCI 240 A Information Architecture I 3 :
L&I SCI 340 A Information Architecture II 3 :
L&I SCI 399 Independent Study; XML 3 :
L&I SCI 440 Information Architecture III 3 :
L&I SCI 510 Introduction to Reference Services & Resources 3 :
L&I SCI 681 Archives & Primary Sources in the information Age 3 :
Electives:
POLI SCI 209 B Issues In Political Thought 4 POL SCI XS :
POLI SCI 260 BC Latin America: An Introduction 4 HIST 180
POL SCI 392 Survey Research: Design, Perform, & Analyize Unemployment Attitudes Poll 3 :
POLI SCI 551 BC Quantitative Analaysis Of Political Data 4 POL SCI 390
POLI SCI 570 C Literature And Politics 4 POL SCI U
POLI SCI 651 B Politics Of South Asia 4 POL SCI U
POLI SCI 654 AB Politics Of Revolution 4 POL SCI 321
ANTHRO 22 B+ Ancient Cities of the Americas 1 :
COMPLIT 232 B+ Literature and Politics: Religious & Moral Perspectives of the 19th & 20th Centuries 3 :
ILS 202 BC Integrated Liberal Studies; Western Culture: History of Science, Technology, & Philosophy II 3 TRAN-L&S XS :
LIT TRAN 262 B Survey Of Chinese Literature 3 COMPLIT X 3.00
AFROAMER 277 B Africa: An Introductory Survey 4 AFRICOL 232
E ASIAN 240 A Introduction to the I-Ching: Book Of Change 2 TRAN-L&S
PHILOS 204 B+ Introduction to Asian Religions 3 :
SPANISH 101 F First Year Spanish 0 SPANISH 103
Course Topic(s): Chinese Calligraphy
PEACEST 201 Introduction to Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution 3
2003-05-28 Deans Honor List
2004-01-06 Deans Honor List
My Learning Prior to SOIS at UWM:
My concentration has been on political science and studies of cultures.
There have been many opportunities for me to integrate my focus on the needs of citizens, whilst pursuing my SOIS studies.
Within SOIS I have focused a few graduate courses on library science, so one could easily say I have concentrated on the citizen need for information resources and how it can best be filled with our current capabilities. I have focused much study on the optimal future development of information resources for public use into the future.
There are several competencies that it has served me well to study; many of the most useful come from the second half of my academic career, when I’ve studied IR at UWM SOIS. The foundation upon which that course of study was laid was half a lifetime’s self directed study on the historical issues of the people in politics, and the possibilities that our technical development can and does open up for a more human future. The core of this study is the first half of my academic career; I particularly was left an impression on by a handful of these classes. Although the mists of time deprive me of much detail, I will start with the classes from my classic liberal arts / humanities phase.
First chapter highlights start with Ancient Cities of the Americas, Anthro 22. Although I can’t remember the professor’s name, he was a giant in his field and had been in charge of the digs at Teotehuacan and Cahokia, each for extended critical periods of time. He taught no more soon after that (1985), and was so old he was difficult to hear, but he put me on to a very important concept that is still having a hard time being accepted as the new paradigm. He told me, in trying to make sense of some details, or another, that there was much circumstantial evidence for many ancient American cities that tells a similar tale.
These city states all developed very complex hierarchies. These tended to grow over time, and eventually become too large and top heavy to be supported by those below. At this point they would eat up all their reserves, and hinterlands. Then when nothing could keep it working, the culture would collapse completely. As there would be no food anywhere nearby, the entire culture of that place would disappear, and the survivors would simply found a new, more egalitarian way of life somewhere else. He was quite convincing with this case using Cahokia, where he was the prominent expert in the field, and the evidence is quite strong now that this was the case. The Teotehuacan hierarchy may have survived somewhat transmuted as the Aztec, or some other aristocracy, its case is not so cut and dried. He hinted that the Maya may also prove to be a similar case, and since he has left us, the case has become pretty solid that the Maya just threw the culture away but are still using many of the same walled orchards, built long ago, today.
This gives me much hope, for I saw us as more like the Cahokian model, but without the ability to escape back to the hinterland and the wilderness. Our culture is so profoundly large, and impacts this planet so universally, that this class helped me see another way that we are meeting a grave new challenge never seen before. Next social collapse, there will be nowhere to leave to. This paradigm also pointed out the degree to which our culture has a built in addiction to frontiers, and that the frontier of human endeavor had transformed historically with the close the physical frontier of earth’s lands.
This lesson was bolstered by my simultaneously taking Anthro 101, and was thrown in sharp contrast by Intro to International Relations (the other IR), Poli Sci 175. A professor whose name I prefer to forget thought that the concept of hegemony was deep, and important, and the greatest thing since sliced bread. I may have been more inclined to agree with him were his intent to teaching hegemony less akin to Kissinger’s intent in practicing it. This semester is when I discovered my true enemy was hierarchal socio-political power, not the hierarchy itself, but the concept of its legitimacy.
So that was my first semester at UWM, formative. Then I went to Madison.
There were four courses that had a great impact on me individually, and one semester when three courses combined to cover the three sides of the golden triangle. These all were part of my focus on the political history of the peoples of our world.
The two most important of these seven were focused on biology and the history of science.
The first of the four was Poli Sci 209, Issues in Political Thought. The issue for the semester was the history of words used to identify political ideologies. In this class I came to understand that disparate modern ideologies had all started as something that I believed in strongly, but that over time the vagaries of political power had twisted the discourse until it was impossible to use these words to have meaningful discussion of the concepts that they represent. This is because they each have so many different meanings to different people. It helped me understand how skewed modern American political discourse is, and why it is so difficult to discuss politics meaningfully in the US. This formed the basis of my ability to define my very simple anarkic beliefs, regardless of my audiences’ understanding of ideological terms.
The theme of Chinese, and Asian religious cultures, that also spanned these years, contributed much to my ability to discuss my spiritual beliefs, which were emerging from my atheism at the same time.
The other Poli Sci course that had great impact was Poli Sci 654, Politics of Revolution. I’d always wanted to see myself as a revolutionary, this course helped me sort thru what is wrong and what is right with the revolutions that have occurred so far. One of the best parts of it was that we looked closely at what causes revolution; what factors were always present, and which, not being present, prevent effective change regardless of the need. The perception of the possibility of positive change appears to be the most important predisposition towards people changing their world. This concept has had a profound impact on me and it has grown stronger and more refined over time.
Two science courses had a profound impact on me in ways that go beyond science to political and spiritual understandings that have remained important to me. The prior semester had laid some foundations for this. Three classes covered different sides of the infamous golden triangle at the same time; this really helped me achieve a good overview of modern western history. Poli Sci 260, Intro to Latin America, and Afroamer 277 Intro to Africa really helped me understand how eurocentric culture has in fact created underdevelopment, and that it is sustained by the state department and other institutions that have inherited the mantle of the wealth and power of the eurocentric economic worldview. The other class I had that semester is hard to describe, for it was an interdisciplinary look at the evolution of western culture, science, technology, and philosophy. Integrated Liberal Studies 202 II was full of expansive ideas and charted the interrelation of what we see as different fields of study, and how they have become fragmented over time. All three of these classes spent the same two weeks on the period of the golden triangle. At the end of this time I realized that I had acquired a quite a broad and comprehensive view of western history, from within it’s philosophical core, and in it’s context of other cultures.
The take home lesson for this semester: when an ancient Greek used the word teknos, he was discussing not only how, and with what, but also why. We have divorced our reason from itself; we do not ask why we design science, technology, and philosophy. They have all become ancillaries to earning money, which motive is unquestioned. That this is the essential goal of our culture (earning more money for/by those who already have much of it), and our biggest barrier to good politics, science, and technology, was beginning to become apparent to me, but it was the history of science that straightened me out for good. I clearly remember History of Science 101, but my transfer transcripts contain no reference to it. It was near the end of this class, which was a broad overview of the rise of modern science over the last few centuries, that I realized that a good portion of the technical difficulties we are having with survival on earth has come from a changing of the priorities and motives for science, research, and technical development over the years.
What originally was a grand enterprise to improve the human condition and grow closer to God by understanding his world better has become mainly harnessed to the capitalist profit motive. There are many small reasons for this, and collectively they are quite substantial. This changed my core understanding, until then I saw all political problems as essentially being solvable by technical solutions.
Now I see that all technical problems require political solutions.
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies:
This brings me to the second half of my course work, a focus on the teknos of solutions to political problems. Entering the SOIS, I had the advantage of seeing technology not as object, but as process implying a purpose. I also had the advantage of knowing the power of information and knowledge to transform our world, as well as knowing the importance information access for everyone has to the world. Though I could only see at the time that I would rather study information use generally than any given field, I have found in IR studies the answers the first half of my studies had sent me looking for.
I felt simultaneously well updated and at home in my first semester back at UWM, in the IR program at SOIS. In L&I SCI 632 and L&I SCI 110 there was much discussion about the ethics of information use. We covered the need for intellectual property security, and the digital divide. These discussions helped bring my focus on socio-political issue back into focus. Class discussion in these classes did more to help me comprehend the current state of these issues more than any other materials could have. These two classes rounded out the competency I brought back to school with me. This is a basic, broad humanities background with a view of the context of our past, but a focus on current and future needs. I have rounded out this competency with the addition of PEACEST 201, Intro to Conflict Resolution, we studied conflict and it’s resolution. There was a real relevance here in that the digital divide and the information economy were important topics of the class. William Ury’s “Getting to Peace” was an excellent text that put a larger context to our cultural development. His essential argument was that we have returned to the expandable economic pie of our ancestors who were hunter-gatherers as a result of the knowledge economy. He places blame for violence amongst humans largely on the limited economic resources of the agricultural revolution. Like a hunter gather economy, but more so, the resources that matter in the knowledge revolution expand when shared, instead of shrinking like land and water do when shared. Ury is famous for his work as a corporate consultant and mediator. This socio-economic competence is formative and central to me. There are three other competencies that I value very much, it is easier to discuss them while discussing the second half of my course work, which is mostly in IR. In a word each: research, project management, and web implementation. My preexisting artistic bent has enjoyed flourishing particularly in web implementation and design.
The core competency that I value having expanded in SOIS, is the ability to do research. In L&I Sci. 210, Foundations of University Library Research, I learned how to research and document a good college paper. I had acquired a pretty good sense for how to write a paper, but this course covers material every student should know about how to use reference materials better to do research and to document it.
In L&I SCI 330, Electronic Info Retrieval, and L&I SCI 510, Intro to Reference Services and Resources, my ability to do research was expanded and solidified. The ability to find the information one needs is the most important skill today in my opinion. In all three of these course’s, databases, the Internet, and practice, were far more powerful than any books that could have been assigned. The familiarity I gained with the use of a reference library is invaluable to me, and was given uncommon depth, for a baccalaureate, by the addition of L&I SCI 681, Using Archives: The Value of Primary Sources in the Information Age. This course is about managing and organizing archives. One of its focuses was about basic marketing issues, this helped complete the course of thought began with L&I SCI 640, Information Marketing. This class was primarily about marketing information; the focus was on marketing free library resources to the public in an information economy. As this course was one of my first IR courses, it set a course of questioning that I followed throughout these following courses, comprising what I call the engineering, or development, competency.
One of the few courses that had books that I thought were instrumental to me was, L&I SCI 310, Human Factors of Info Seeking and Use. This course was essentially a study of usability. As someone who has an interest in universal info access, it was very instructive to study the methods of measuring and ameliorating usability problems. There were two books in this class that left an impression on me. The first was “Don’t Make Me Think”, almost a new type of book, being easy to skim and navigate; it was the best example I’ve ever seen for Steve Krug’s points about web design in book form. Donald Norman’s “Things that Make Us Smart” was all about how the focus of the information technology should be on conforming it to human needs, as opposed to the recent historical trend of adapting human behavior to the machines. To function, the knowledge economy technology needs to make us smarter. Tools that are not easily handled by the human mind don’t makes us smart as effectively.
To further bolster this engineering, or product development, focus, it was instructive to have three other courses in addition. L&I SCI 250, Internet Planning & Implementation, taught me how to build an enterprise scale intranet, and introduced the concept of project management, and working in groups. PM techniques were expanded upon and given depth and context in L&I SCI 340, Information Architecture II. Here we learned about basic PM tools and techniques. This was a good course for understanding information projects in the context of a modern corporate culture that is aware of the need for good project management. In L&I SCI 490, Senior Capstone, we put PM methods and tools into use in a group project of design and implementation of a scripted website.
The capstone class also capped off experience and formal study in the remaining competency, interactive web design and implementation. This is the competency that I most enjoy exercising and learning, because it satisfies my creative and artistic self. In L&S 110, we were introduced to HTML markup. I was delighted to design my first web page in this class, and this carried over into L&I SCI 240, Information Architecture I, where we learned a lot about HTML and learned some JavaScript as well. We also learned about CSS and other kinds of templates. L&I SCI 440, Information Architecture III, expanded this scripting background; we designed ASP and PHP interactive web applications that worked with databases. There were several good texts covered in these courses, but the best sources were web based, like Webmonkey.com, and W3C pages.
Future Directions:
Designing web implementations gave me ideas that may bring all these competencies back together. I am working out some ideas I have for how web applications can be used to automate some of the work of group self governance. On the surface the concept is no more than a survey, but it is hyper survey. A web application could make it much easier, and more democratic, to share opinions and decisions. Just for beginners, we could rank the questions to order them by value, and share each other’s answers. Most important, the web environment will enable more ease of rewording of proposed questions and the posting new questions by participants. All in all, there is much room to improve communication, expression, and decisions, on political matters in the online environment. There are security issues that I find hard to solve simply, without the use of nominal Paypal payments, or some other such conceptually inappropriate use, but they are not intractable to a fair solution, and new solutions will arise organically.
A similar idea is to use cooperative effort to compile useful link lists to serve the peoples’ expanding need for coherence in the flood of data. A multi-axis system of categories and rankings could be combined with user inputs and valuations. This could enable the finding, and listing, of links in a number of different criteria simultaneously, with a ranking along a spectrum of each criterion. In this way one could search for just the right level of knowledge at the intersection of several interests. Some of these axes (political radicalism, or left-right spectrum, as opposed to the freedom-safety spectrum, or scientific radical-conservative spectrum) would be more subjective and geared towards values, trust, and taste. XML, which was the topic of my independent study, L&I SCI 399, is a markup that would make a good platform core for these types of applications.
My focus on universal empowerment through knowledge access has been brought much empowerment itself, in the form of these three other competencies. Research, product development, and web implementation, are well bundled here to perform the job I have assigned myself. It is my job to help all I can to ensure that these possibilities are used to help us all, for our boat is now to small for us to survive historic levels of collective individual selfishness. The new frontier is knowledge automation, but good results there are right next door to everyone, truly this is a new kind of new frontier. Clearly this frontier is in many ways the most open ever in terms of possibilities. I have confidence in our ability to build a sustainable knowledge economy, for the possibilities are limited only by our imagination. Yet I am concerned, for Politics of Revolution has taught me that we will not change our ways unless we perceive that we are able, and there is much in our socio-economic system that argues that we are helpless before it. We are not, however, helpless before it, it is we. Whether we know, or care, or not, every one of us changes and defines our culture, every day.
Currently I see my future in self employment as a webmaster while also working in the non-profit sector and/or knowledge industry. It is my dream to work with the national Green Party web team while working for Google. In both cases I would seek to work on ideas like the two cited above. Ultimately I would like to work in consulting and as a webmaster, while creating a game site out of the Science Fiction Utopian novel I’ve been working on. I would like to find a way to express my artistic urges in the meantime, so I am thinking about studies in computer imagery. In the meantime I intend to spend my summer learning Macromedia.
Download Academic Portfolio 2005 as a .doc, .odt, .rtf, or .txt.
Personnel Committee
Peace Action Wisconsin
1001 E. Keefe Ave.
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Re: Office Manager
Esteemed Committee Being,
I was very pleased to see the email announcing the opening of the office manager position. I feel both that I am an excellent candidate for the position and that it is an excellent fit for my own professional growth and fulfilment.
I have theoretical training in the structure of databases and am familiar with spreadsheets, databases, and web based data structuring, but am inexperienced in accounting. I am, however, confident in my math skills, my ability to learn quickly, and my ability to teach myself on line. I grew up in a family business household, working in the fund raising sector, and have close friends with whom I discuss spreadsheets and other such instruments, so I am aware of many of the concepts behind bookkeeping.
An inveterate learner of everything, I always learn more about whatever it is I am doing. Working for peace is something I’ve been studying and doing all of my adult life. I would love to have more opportunities to focus upon it.
As someone with an often unique perspective on things, I am used to putting consensus between others ahead of my personal feelings. Regardless of the institution I’m working within, compromise is the soul of politics. I enjoy looking at both sides of an argument until we all can find the most solid common ground.
In many contexts I have discovered that I enjoy serving others, working with others, and working with the public. As I have yet to be employed in a context where I enjoy both serving well, and working with, the public, I look forward to meeting with you to discuss my fitness for this position, and thank you kindly for your consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Monte N. Letourneau
I would be most proud to work for ICS, and would strive to become a real asset to the school.
My Skill Set:
Familiarity with assistance, learning, and multimedia on Windows and Mac networked platforms,
enjoyment of a facility with helping and learning, full familiarity with small network hardware, and a designer’s eye for detail.
I understand organizing information resources for research and learning, creating web multimedia training and assisting aides,graphic design, desktop publishing of organizational publicity and paper communications, social and eco activism, local indio cultures in biological, historical, and cultural context, and practices of consensus decision making.
I don’t like to do Joomla anymore, I vastly prefer to work with WordPress and am as rapidly losing whatever qualifications I had for creating in Drupal and Joomla as I did for hacking and maintaining Windows, which I was much better at – until Ubuntu set me free.
www.metrodining.ca- random high end looking Joomla site.There are a lot of options today to enable those needing cheap access to an enterprise quality web presence.We can easily do far better than just to provide web services and hosting. I can create and index lists of resources that enable sites to be easily created, quickly modified, and updated with barely computer literate skill sets.
Regardless of whether we are looking for a very intensive focus on setting up a few clients with web pages and maintaining these sites, or want to take a more labor extensive approach to maximize the number which can be assisted by teaching each to be more self sufficient (leaving more time for expert assistance with graphics, design, advice, and opinion, instead of daily maintenance), there are many open source platforms available for free that can produce a better return on our labors.
Historically, few resources have been as undervalued as online learning resources are right now, especially in such fields as open source CMS use. To do the work of indexing, tagging, and commenting, on such resources can create a lot of value with freely available info and a little time.
I already seek to create an indexing of tutorials, free templates, and other free resources for the beginning Joomla user, enabling people to make professional web sites for free, or very professional sites for very low cost. I also have been working to collect freeware, troubleshooting, and advice, resources, to help people take better control of their Windows machines and be more self sufficient. It has been hard to continue this work over the years, as few, besides my professors, have shown much interest or received much benefit yet, and as I have been using Ubuntu lately myself. The kind of work that WBI does provides the perfect opportunity for me to continue work on creating a site and a work flow that can really make a difference for people who do not have as much training, time, or money, as most people think it takes to achieve an effective and productive web space.
Joomla & Drupal
The Joomla! CMS (Content Management System) has shown many people that it is more important to have an easily modified site accessible to more than just the Webmasters, than to have one that uses all the latest flashy techniques to just look good and do nothing.
Between them, Drupal and Joomla have remained the two most popular Open Source CMSs for many years, despite having been joined by thousands of competitors. Being most widely used, they are also most widely contributed to by Open Source fans.
CMS allows a site to be much more interactive, adaptable, easily posted to, and edited. For individual webmasters similar efforts at hand coding such database integration cannot begin to achieve as much function as quickly and reliably as an average computer literate user can get from Joomla.
Optional plugins can easily add more interactive functionality to Joomla, adding value for customers to the product. These two links are to products which allow reservations using forms on the website http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-plugin/Restaurant-Reservation-plugin.html, and to easily design and change menus http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-component/Joomla-Restaurant-component.html.
This kind of updated currency and functional usefullness can be far less frustrating than waiting for a pretty page to load that then does not perform any useful function which a print ad cannot.
Restaurants are a great example here. Ambience is an important part of the service for many restaurants, but it is not the only reason for patronage. People expect that the food will have at least as much value as the setting. Similarly, a nice looking flash site can bring much ambience, but no one goes to a restaurant’s site seeking entertainment, they want to eat or they would not be there.
Many firms are using such systems to use low cost labor to produce results that are billed for as if much technical skill was required when it was not. The disjunct between the public perception of webmaster skill requirements and increasingly easily automated chimp work creates many profit opportunities. One such opportunity is helping the small business owner get what they need for a good price in a treacherous market.
The problem is that although CMS are much easier to learn and use than the old hand coding and FTP transfers, there are many things about the work flow that are very counter intuitive at first. One can spend days spinning one’s wheels trying to figure out what one is supposed to be doing, especially just getting started all alone. These kinds of frustration that I have had to deal with have shown me what is most important to know and how to avoid the pitfalls. I would love to pass this info on in some more permanent archive so that others do not have to reinvent the wheel.
This seems a great opportunity for me to work on the self help materials and advising skills that I have been wanting to assemble for some time, while also sharpening my more practiced skills of graphic web design, user empathy, and information architecture.
To see a small sample of the range of tutorials already freely available see the link list at the bottom of this page.
I do not yet have the tools to quickly create a site like www.metrodining.ca, but the tools are relatively quite cheap and I already have a great interest in purchasing them. Joomla tools and expansions are usually a great deal for the money compared to any similarly effective option. Of course this results in many deals being offered that are not as good as they could be. I can offer good advice on buying templates, extensions, plug-ins, and services. Generally one can get an awful lot in this regard for $15-$50, some useful extensions are even cheaper than that.
One thing is for certain, while www.metrodining.ca is similar to sites that can cost as much as $3000-$4000 or more, it probably came in well under 10% of that. Even if one seeks the very best, Joomla or Drupal can make it better much cheaper.
To look at the Joomla admin interface, or take it for a test drive:
In the resulting screen enter this data:Username = humanPassword = admin
The “Content” drop down menu is the most interesting one at first, one can go to “Articles” to post a new article or to edit old ones, or rearrange the front page in “Front Page Manager”. This is also where one adds and edits “Sections” and “Categories” which can greatly help improve the sites usefulness if properly utilized. If one wants to create a link to a new page for an article, category, or section, one must go to the “Menus” drop down menu.
One can also control users, user groups and access levels, installation of extensions and templates, placement and enabling of the different modules, and many other things, from the Admin Control Panel.
Look & Layout, Templates:The “look and feel”, or overall graphic design, of a Joomla Site is controlled by a CSS template. My sites intentionally use the three default templates to keep things simple and consistent, but there are many great templates available for free.Three Default Joomla Templates come with every install: http://necedahharvest.org/ JA Purity http://montesite.net/joomla/ Rhuk Milkyway http://montesite.net/test/ Beez
I will be creating a list of the best sites offering quality free templates which can be installed gratis. There will also be a growing list of templates displayed on a local server from which to choose.
There are many more, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I will also be creating a list of resources on how to modify or create Joomla templates, and will work with users to ensure that their sites reflect the branding and intent of the enterprise at hand.As with other training materials, where pre-existing resources are scarce, or where the most relevant materials contain much that is not relevant, I intend to create more training resources to fill such gaps.
The first resource I plan to purchase given additional funds is a recently released template editor, Artisteer http://www.artisteer.com/. Artisteer’s drag and drop interface with buttons allows anyone to easily manipulate templates (for $129.95). This will allow further, and more efficient, customization, and for appropriate branding to be exercised within the available templates, or it can allow entirely new templates to be built to user branding specifications.
Until I have acquired the expertise to create a site like www.metrodining.ca, I will still be a very good judge of prices, and the field of contenders, and will help those who opt to spend some money find better deals on competent Template designs and plug-ins to expand functionality.
There are several business suites of plug-ins and extension modules available for nominal fees that allow better e-commerce integration and more options. I also expect to be investing in some of these for our program. The over head of buying Joomla services and products is low, for there is always a free way that can be wrestled into the desired shape with enough effort, and the ethic of Open Source is the foundation of the industry after all. Quite often a nominal subscription fee is charged over a time period that allows one to download all the materials one is interested in at the time, this will allow me too cheaply and quickly build a library of such assets for this program and public future use.
When I have had some more experience with Artisteer, I will add a form to specify most of the more commonly useful design options in order to standardize, automate, and facilitate, user design input and requests.
As the effort acquires more plug-ins, templates, and extension modules, more pages will go up on a central index to show how to use these options.
Promotion of everything has become common on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the myriad social web applications. I have spent years trying many of them and finding out which are best for what. As the biggest by far, Facebook has proved to be the king in most respects, but social bookmarking is often ovelooked as a real help to publicizing and promoting sites.
Google ranking, reciprocal links, and other web promotion methods.
Other important resources and information for a neophyte’s web presence include ones about understanding and implementing effective website monetization, promotion, and metrics. This is another skill set that has been made much easier and more effective every day by good technical solutions, especially ones coming from Google. This is another arena where lots of great advice and tutorials can be found online, but they are swamped in even more marginally helpful content promoting the purchase of something the well informed do not really need.
This is another area that I have been keeping up on that this would provide a welcome opportunity for a more intensive focus on: indexing links to best practices and strategies for web metrics, site promotion techniques, better search rankings, reciprocal links, and selling or purchasing advertising.
All of my own intellectual work is always open source, I do not want to own it. The Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation will have every right to use it in perpetuity; in return, no party will have control or ownership over my intellectual property. Conversely, all users of the service will retain all ownership of their sites’ content, and any custom work on sites’ templates.
We stand on the shoulders of our forebears, and we owe it to those who have passed their knowledge on to us to reciprocally share our protion of the unlimited bounty of human ingenuity and imagination.
I have no interest in becoming irreplaceable. To me any job done well is one that is documented well enough to be easy to pick up after a disaster or loss of the organizing worker, especially in the information economy. Transparency and good documentation are key to the long term health of any web space.
Let’s create an infrastructure that will allow us to help people help themselves first, so as to have the resources left to provide expert opinions, advice, and skills support.
Esteemed Committee Being,
I was very pleased to see the email announcing the opening of the Fund Raising Assistant position. I feel both that I am an excellent candidate for the position and that it is an excellent fit for my own professional growth and personal fulfillment.
I have had a fair amount of experience at using the phone in a professional manner, much of which there is little to be proud of, and no room for in my resume.
As a youth, my parents ran a fund raising subcontracting business out of our home, so from an early age I was used to answering the phone and speaking in a professional manner.
One of the first jobs I ever had was as a survey taker for Pert Survey Research, doing market research. For a very short while soon after that i had a job selling substandard machine shop supplies at exorbitant prices, this is where I learned that it matters very much to me that my work be constructive and helpful to others.
During the 80′s I also had a brief stint as a canvasser for Wisconsin Action Coalition and Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, these were both cut short by problems with my knees due to injuries sustained late in my teenage years.
I worked for the campaign of Peter Blewett (District 7 and President of the Milwaukee School Board) during his last re-election, using the state of the art phone banking system of the SEIU.
Later that same year I was involved in the design, performance, and analysis of a poll on the attitudes of Wisconsinites to unemployment and the minimum wage for the class POL SCI 392 Survey Research, at UW Milwaukee.
Working for Green issues is something that I have sought to do for most of my life, and I would love to have an opportunity to begin to focus my career upon it.
In many contexts I have discovered that I enjoy serving others, working with others, and working with the public. As I have yet to be employed in a context where I get to enjoy both serving well, and working constructively with, the public, I look forward to being considered a good fit for this position.
Sincerely yours,
Monte N. Letourneau
Enclosure: Resume
My academic portfolio and more about me can be found at: Resume Index
I don’t like to do Joomla anymore, I vastly prefer to work with WordPress and am as rapidly losing whatever qualifications I had for creating in Drupal and Joomla as I did for hacking and maintaining Windows, which I was much better at – until Ubuntu set me free.
There are a lot of options today to enable those needing cheap access to an enterprise quality web presence.
We can do more than providing static web services. I can create and index lists of resources that better enable sites to be easily created, quickly modified, and updated with barely computer literate skills.
Whether the need is an intensive focus on a few clients, or to maximize the number which can be assisted, there are open source platforms available that can produce a better return on our labors.
Joomla! CMS (Content Management System) has shown many people that it is more important to have an easily modified site accessible by more than just Webmasters, than one that uses the latest flashy techniques to just look good and do nothing.
Drupal and Joomla have remained the most popular Open Source CMSs for many years, even though they’ve been joined by thousands of competitors.CMS allows a site to be much more interactive, adaptable, easily posted to, and edited. For individual webmasters similar efforts at hand coding such database integration cannot begin to achieve as much function as quickly and reliably as an average computer literate user can get from Joomla.
The work flow of a CMS is awkward at first. Many days can be saved by having some very simple things pointed out up front. I would like to make link lists and desktop vid tutorials to ensure people get off on the right foot by becoming familiar with the tasks of editing and creating articles.
Where there are gaps between the diverse and numerous aids and resources available for free, I will create desktop video tutorials like this one http://montesite.net/os/tutorial/1.html.
While some of the best Joomla tools and plug-ins are not free they are usually quite cheap. I am likely to buy all we need myself anyway given a renewed regular income.
Certainly, while www.metrodining.ca is similar to sites that can cost as much as $3000-$4000 or more, it could have come in well under 10% of that. Even seeking the very best, Joomla or Drupal can make it better, cheaper, faster, easier.
To look at the Joomla admin interface, or take it for a test drive:
In the resulting screen enter this data:Username = human
Password = admin
The “Content” drop down menu is the most interesting one. Go to “Articles” to post a new article or to edit old ones, or rearrange the front page in “Front Page Manager”.
“Look and feel”, or overall design, of a Joomla Site is controlled by a CSS template.
I’ll create a list of the best sites offering quality free templates which can be installed gratis, and a growing list of templates displayed on a local server from which to choose more quickly. A list of resources on how to modify or create Joomla templates can accompany this.
I will work with users to ensure that their sites well reflect the branding and intent of their enterprise, and I can help with branding development by suggesting logos and graphics.
The first resource I plan to purchase given additional funds is a recently released template editor. Artisteer’s intuitive drag and drop interface allows anyone to easily manipulate templates ($129.95, twice tha price of any other Joomla product I know of).
There are several business suites of plug-ins and extension modules available for nominal fees that allow better e-commerce integration and more options. I also expect to be investing in some of these anyway. The over head of buying Joomla services and products is kept low, for there is always a free option.As the effort acquires more plug-ins, templates, and extension modules, more pages will go up on a central index to show how to use these options.
Socialweb Apps and Promotion
I have tried hundreds of socialweb applications. As the biggest by far, Facebook has proved to be the king in most respects, but social bookmarking is often overlooked as a real help to publicizing and promotion. My Social Web Apps List
Other important resources and information for a neophyte’s web presence include ones about understanding and implementing effective website monetization, promotion, and metrics. This is another skill set that has been made much easier by good technical solutions.
About My Work
All of my own intellectual work is always open source. The Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation will have every right to use it in perpetuity.
I believe in thorough documentation of work flow, practices, and priorities, to create a durability to my work on structuring information.
Let’s create an infrastructure of resources that will allow us to help people help themselves first, so as to have the resources left to provide expert opinions, advice, and skillful support.
2007; Southway Bait Sales @ http://southwaybaitsales.com/home.htm. Definitely the pinnacle of my hand coding work, I spent ages getting the look and feel I wanted. Unfortunately it still does not function as intended. The creation of a Pay-Pal account, a retail price and shipping cost structure, and the editing of an old VHS vid, all took so long that we lost the password and the will to recover it.
2007; Workhorse Project, some good freinds were looking for a loan to launch a cyber cafe with a catering and delivery site, with computer sales recycling and service as an integral part. This material was quickly designed to help get the loan, which was not in the end granted.
2006; Shiraz Project, I worked hard to propose a site based on current branding and images from print and facilities, they went with a cousin from Chicago wh set them up with a mostly black site. I see they have had it changed again, this is much more what I was working towards but is more subtle and dignified http://www.shirazpersiangrill.com/.
2004; Second commercial site, for local rapper Lil’ Dude, @ http://montesite.net/os/lildude/index.php. I started this one in php with a mind towards being able to add more functionality down the line, nonetheless it still remained largely an html based site. Not only has the artist changed his name, but they have since decided to go without a website of their own. In 2008 he set up a more modern page at http://lildude.net/home.html. It has been good for me to see this young man’s career progress apace, he has worked with many talented music biz veterans. Some errors on the front page result from my header and footer for montesite.net being blocked by the Joomla installation.
2003; First commercial site, for my sister’s business, now defunct, @ http://montesite.net/os/r2/home.html. This would have been much easier to build in a scripted user managed space like this one, but, unaware, I built it in raw html with well over 100 hand coded pages. The shopping cart worked back when we had a live paypal account. My sister’s partner absconded with most of the actual product soon after the site went up, so it was never able to be used as intended.
Drupal is More Complex & Flexible than Joomla, less used, more powerful for custom script and DBs. http://wigp.org/ – The Primary Site I Help Oversee with Others
http://drupal.org/ – The Original Best Nonprofit Oriented Open Source CMS Has Found Much Commercial Use
“The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.
Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.
Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science,
and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception,” fr. “The Wisdom Of Insecurity.”
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes.
Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
We try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible
without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
The trouble is, that we have one-sided minds, and we notice the wave of life when it is at its peak or crest.
And the more you become aware of the unknown self – if you become aware of it -
the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around,
that’s how it feels inside your head.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
The Bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered,
they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
So then, in Buddhism, change is emphasized.
You must understand as one of the fundamental points of Buddhism, the idea of the world as being in flux.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination.
There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money…
they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
“The more we try to catch hold of the present moment the more elusive it
becomes. It is like trying to clutch water in ones hands. The harder we
grip, the more it slips through our fingers.”
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize
that they are one and the same process as the universe.
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America.
And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
What I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system
in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature,
and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union.
A person who is fanatic in matters of religion,
and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe,
becomes a person who has no faith at all.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.
When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there the central self,
you can call it God, you can call it anything you like, and it’s all of us.
Buddhism is not saying that the Self, the great Atman, or whatnot,
it isn’t denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.
If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other,
life implies death – or shall I say, death implies life – you can conceive yourself.
reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
“The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.”
~ Krishna from The Bhagavad Gita:
It is better to strive in one’s own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another.
Nothing is ever lost in following one’s own dharma. But competition in another’s dharma breeds fear and insecurity.
He alone sees truly who sees the Lord the same in every creature…seeing the same Lord everywhere,
he does not harm himself or others.
As long as you have attachment to the body and attachment to objects, fear and suffering will be with you.
Therefore, Krishna told Arjuna to develop his discrimination and rid himself of body consciousness.
He told him that once he was free of body consciousness he would be able to develop integral vision.
The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results.
Abandon all attachment to the results of action and attain supreme peace.
~ J.C. :
I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.
–
If we follow these principles, there is now to be found a short path available to technical mastery of mortality and mortal sufferings for earthlings, a reunification with our environs.
The principles have a simple base:
Do not confuse the map with reality – mind is a powerful map, but it is just a map.
Treat Others as though they were self, for we are all waves in one ocean.
Do not believe, see.
Do not hope, have faith in ourselves and The Allness.
Keith Olbermann on on “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZKETizybw
With an excellent origin of corporate personhood and some sober predictions.
Great place to read of successful local fights so far, and HOW THEY DID IT,
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund: http://www.celdf.org/
For example, the Town of Halifax VA, the 10th municipality in the US to
prohibit corporate rights from being used to override the rights of human
and natural communities: http://www.celdf.org/Default.aspx?tabid=504
“I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan. November 12, 1816
This has been a long time coming, we have for far too long been beholden to the misreporting of a court recorder on this very important issue. The 14th amendment was intended to apply to humans, such rights never were intended to be applied to corporations.
These immortal social machines must be seen as potential monsters which are inherently dangerous to humans’ rights, not seen as humans with rights. The insistence by recent courts that money is speech is similarly spurious, transparently insane, and extremely dangerous to living beings. We must move beyond both of these travesties if we are to have a world where complex living beings have a chance to survive for purposes that do not serve profits.
Ultimately money and corporations are abstractions of the human social order and they should not have obtained the domination of life on Earth that they already have. By whatever means necessary we must defend the ability of life to continue evolution beyond the reign of imaginary machines.
These imaginary constructs will become increasingly embodied in robot and computer intelligence and thus more independent of beings that have life as we have known it to date. We are in a time when we must choose whether the machines are to become more human means of fulfillment for the living or if life itself is to become a mere cog in the machine.
Defining human rights as money, and as belonging to corporations, is a recipe for nothing but continued acceleration of the rates of extinction of species and changing of climate, which have already begun to make the lives of many humans precarious, and will continue to get more and more unsustainable in terms of large mammal specie’s survival. We are already losing species at the rate of several hundred a day. Humans need other species, and we need species to have rights, much more than we need corporations to have rights.
“Today the business once transacted by individuals in every community is in the control of corporations, and many of the men who once conducted an independent business are gathered into the organization, and all personal identity, and all individualities lost. Each man has become a mere cog in one of the wheels of a complicated mechanism. It is the business of the corporations to get money. It exacts but one thing of its employees: Obedience to orders. It cares not about their relations to the community, the church, society, or the family. It wants full hours and faithful service, and when they die, wear out or are discharged, it quickly replaces them with new material.
The corporation is a machine for making money, but it reduces men to the insignificance of mere numerical figures, as certainly as the private ranks of the regular army.”
~ Fighting Bob La Follette, speech on the Dangers Threatening Representative Government, Mineral Point, Wisconsin, July 4, 1897
As though we must always eternally be at war against each other to win forth on the glorious field of money for all that matters is accumulating abstract measures of wealth amongst those who already can not even begin to spend it all without dictating the lives of many others.
Want legislation written by and for humans?
Vote with the party that takes no corporate money and
is committed to an amendment abolishing corporate personhood; see http://gp.org
peace justice democracy responsible local sustainable
diversity and equality for women and Earth
Currently i still feel many of us are “talking” past each other,
but we are consistently increasingly on the same page.
I still have a sense that the vast majority of the GPUS basically agrees on how to do things,
down to the content of the platform by and large,
and trust that the NC will find a way to articulate that in voting for good proposals.
As i have come to see the GPUS NC, as it currently is, as un-poll-able,
excepting putting a proposal in que for formal vote,
i come increasingly to believe many votes should fail,
and many more should be tuned up and brought back around frequently,
in one form or another, until we have found something
approaching (albeit barely) optimum.
Unfortunately, in a personal sense i seldom vote against the imperfect,
and prefer to vote for what i believe is considered near consensus.
The rise of hierarchy is due to the fact
that consensus does not work well on the battlefield.
In this era the battlefield is an electronic one,
supporting broad consensus and more diverse and distributed visions and decisions.
Electronic means can bring the responsiveness of hierarchy to consensual decision making.
We can build the tools to embody such self governance in GPUS bodies,
we can proof them out and graft them onto US “democracy” as law,
when it gets us elected…
While we do, the corps(es) will be building similar toolage,
people will more frequently expect to join in governance council,
in the “private” sphere.
None of this will change the core dynamic of consensus.
No matter who he is, or what he has done,
Sitting Bull must still go sit for days at the fire of Red Cloud’s clan
many times before he is ready to call for Grand Council.
One must work out the issues between one’s clan and any others,
and eliminate faction and discord in the nation,
then find the favored plan and means of major clans and elders,
then work to forge a plan that all can consent to.
Then one goes to council with one’s nation.
Lacking leisurely time to react to the changes we have wrought,
we at this point can only be jealous of the ancient practices,
before kings, priests, soldiers, and guns.
Telephones, TV, Radio, the papers,
we have become inured to the idea that mass media
is either one on one, or one to many.
The email list is no camp fire, we must find better ways,
but until we do, any elder must still go to the camp of his competitor,
and find a way to caress his ear with what he wants to hear.
However, we do increasingly have the means to create the electronic clan fire,
and we do not have much time to do it.
We all know this, but as individuals we all keep forgetting.
The process as we have come to expect it is unwieldy,
and we are far from helpless to fix it.
Until then, patience will remain it’s own reward in these matters.
As a graduating student, you are to construct a portfolio. Your portfolio should include 5-7 double-spaced pages (Does not include title page, table of content, and bibliography). The primary audience for your portfolio is your 490 professor. Below is the direction.
1) Title page and Annotated Table of Contents.
The title page should include your name, major, email address and date of submission. The Table of Contents should communicate careful and logical organization and enable readers to find materials easily.
2) List of all courses you have taken/are currently taking.
This should be organized in the following manner:
Area I: UWM Distribution Requirements — General Education
Area II: BSIR Core Courses
Area III: BSIR Cross-functional Electives
Area IV: General Electives, including Cognate Areas of Study
3) You as a learner
Using specific details and with reference to a variety of texts and experiences, you are to examine your educational experience as a college student and to create a meaningful statement of your learning. In particular you are asked to discuss how your learning is integrative and to discuss work in your concentration.
In this section you need to address these questions:
(1) how have you developed as a learner/thinker;
(2) What have you learned in BSIR major; and
(3) how has your experience been integrative (Integrative: What connections or contrasts have you found among and between ideas and experiences in your learning communities, courses, and experiential learning, etc.?)
4) Discuss competencies pertinent to your BSIR major and/or experience
You are to select 4 competencies that are especially important to you. Define each competency and explain how the competency is relevant to your major or experience. You may want to discuss some of the specific skills and abilities that make up each competency.
5) Future directions
This section should include the following components:
(1) a statement of approximately 2 paragraphs explaining your degree program in integrative studies.
(2) Your updated resume, carefully written and designed, accompanied by a brief statement explaining the target audience for which you have shaped this particular version of your resume.
(3) Statement of career and personal goals as you see them currently.
(4) Future learning in a competency area. Questions you might consider:
((A) What are some of your learning goals, short-term and longer-term?
((B) What are your current goals for graduate school or career?
((C) What are some personal goals (for example, goals connected to travel or to competencies such as effective citizenship, global perspective or valuing)?
6) Bibliography
In your essays, you will need to refer specifically to sources such as books, journal articles, lecture notes, etc. Please be sure to cite these in appropriate format.
To understand the Information Resources program at the UWM School of Information Science one must first understand the ‘word’ meta in both it’s broadest and narrowest senses.
UWM School of Library and Information Science Home
BSIR at UWM SOIS Home
A participant in the BSIR program is expected to have a relatively good expertise with many WinXP productivity and collaboration programs, and often various methods of online access from the classroom to resources, or to class resources from home, were required competancies.
To make good use of the BSIR program one will understand that in our evolving information economy, meta-knowledge, about how to find organize, and use, data, to obtain information that can foster more and better knowledge, is a powerful engine of productivity. Using such meta-knowledge to multiply such meta-knowledge by organizing, improving, and sharing it, leverages multiple strong levers of positive socioeconomic and technologia methodology trends to increase the positive feedback among them. The potential of these factors to encourage, and depend upon, more horizontal decision making, and sharing of infomation, resources, and tasks, increases the power of the positive feedback already working to strengthen all these trends and tie them tighter together to cement a more positive sustainable future.
These are some of many possible examples of important meta-knowledge embedded in my BSIR program.
There is a focus on finding, evaluating, and increasing the value of information resources, especially through organizing, sharing, and automation of, information resources. Another focus to pursue these same aims is meta-data, the methodology of the technology of tagging and markup, a core set of skills for organizing and structuring electronic information resources. The things that most attracted me at first were the focus on research, the use, and administration of, libraries, an interdisciplinary approach to web technologies, and the encouragement for customization of one’s curriculum.
One of the main lessons I take from my studies in BSIR at UWM, is about culture. About how different cultural concepts of what define success, competance, and function, what is means and end, and how vertical an expectation of hierarchy one has, create deep divisions among organizational structures and create barriers to production and sharing of the technical means. These are much harder to bridge today than traditional cultural divisions based on language, nation, race, creed, or configuration. In other words, languges divide Daimler/Chrystler much less than the cultural gap between speakers of managerial, sales, and engineering terminologies.
One must train in all fields to counter this, there must be information workers, knowledge workers, and cultural workers, who are working on cohesion, unifiing or diverging fields of seeking, understanding, and acting. I seem destined to try to accomplish all three approaches to the most meta of understandings and skills. This was the perfect degree for today’s renascence being. Especially so for myself, as i am convinced that better sharing our heritage of information, knowledge, habit, and other such important cultural toolage, is the pathway to a sane sustainable future.
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies
Future Directions
List of My Courses:
Course Grade Description Credits Transferred As
Area I
E ASIAN 101 D First Semester Chinese 6 LINGUIS 121
COMP LIT 288 AB Masterpieces of Literature For Honors II 3 COMPLIT 208
LINGUIS 200 A- Aspects of Language 3 :
ANTHRO 101 A- Introduction to Anthro – Human Prehistory 3 :
POL SCI 175 B+ Introduction to International Relations 3 :
WL ECOL 360 B Extinction Of Species 3 BIO SCI XN
ZOOLOGY 120 BC Biological Principles and their Impact On Society 3 BIO SCI 103
Area II
L&I SCI 632 A Microcomputer-Information Resources Management 3
L&I SCI 110 A Introduction to Information Science 3
L&I SCI 210 A- Foundations of University Library Research 3 :
L&I SCI 230 A Organization of Knowledge 3 :
L&I SCI 250 A Internet Planning & Implementation 3 :
L&I SCI 330 Electronic Information Retrieval 3 :
L&I SCI 410 Database Information Retrieval Systems 3 :
L&I SCI 430 Multimedia Application Development 3 :
L&I SCI 490 Senior Capstone; DVD Site Project Management & this document 3 :
Area III
Business:
L&I SCI 640 A- Information Marketing 3 :
Area IV
L&I SCI 240 A Information Architecture I 3 :
L&I SCI 340 A Information Architecture II 3 :
L&I SCI 399 Independent Study; XML 3 :
L&I SCI 440 Information Architecture III 3 :
L&I SCI 510 Introduction to Reference Services & Resources 3 :
L&I SCI 681 Archives & Primary Sources in the information Age 3 :
Electives:
POLI SCI 209 B Issues In Political Thought 4 POL SCI XS :
POLI SCI 260 BC Latin America: An Introduction 4 HIST 180
POL SCI 392 Survey Research: Design, Perform, & Analyze Unemployment Attitudes Poll 3 :
POLI SCI 551 BC Quantitative Analysis Of Political Data 4 POL SCI 390
POLI SCI 570 C Literature And Politics 4 POL SCI U
POLI SCI 651 B Politics Of South Asia 4 POL SCI U
POLI SCI 654 AB Politics Of Revolution 4 POL SCI 321
ANTHRO 22 B+ Ancient Cities of the Americas 1 :
COMPLIT 232 B+ Literature and Politics: Religious & Moral Perspectives of the 19th & 20th Centuries 3 :
ILS 202 BC Integrated Liberal Studies; Western Culture: History of Science, Technology, & Philosophy II 3 TRAN-L&S XS :
LIT TRAN 262 B Survey Of Chinese Literature 3 COMPLIT X 3.00
AFROAMER 277 B Africa: An Introductory Survey 4 AFRICOL 232
E ASIAN 240 A Introduction to the I-Ching: Book Of Change 2 TRAN-L&S
PHILOS 204 B+ Introduction to Asian Religions 3 :
SPANISH 101 F First Year Spanish 0 SPANISH 103
Course Topic(s): Chinese Calligraphy
PEACEST 201 Introduction to Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution 3
2003-05-28 Deans Honor List
2004-01-06 Deans Honor List
My Learning Prior to SOIS at UWM:
My concentration has been on political science and studies of cultures.
There have been many opportunities for me to integrate my focus on the needs of citizens, whilst pursuing my SOIS studies.
Within SOIS I have focused a few graduate courses on library science, so one could easily say I have concentrated on the citizen need for information resources and how it can best be filled with our current capabilities. I have focused much study on the optimal future development of information resources for public use into the future.
There are several competencies that it has served me well to study; many of the most useful come from the second half of my academic career, when I’ve studied IR at UWM SOIS. The foundation upon which that course of study was laid was half a lifetime’s self directed study on the historical issues of the people in politics, and the possibilities that our technical development can and does open up for a more human future. The core of this study is the first half of my academic career; I particularly was left an impression on by a handful of these classes. Although the mists of time deprive me of much detail, I will start with the classes from my classic liberal arts / humanities phase.
First chapter highlights start with Ancient Cities of the Americas, Anthro 22. Although I can’t remember the professor’s name, he was a giant in his field and had been in charge of the digs at Teotehuacan and Cahokia, each for extended critical periods of time. He taught no more soon after that (1985), and was so old he was difficult to hear, but he put me on to a very important concept that is still having a hard time being accepted as the new paradigm. He told me, in trying to make sense of some details, or another, that there was much circumstantial evidence for many ancient American cities that tells a similar tale.
These city states all developed very complex hierarchies. These tended to grow over time, and eventually become too large and top heavy to be supported by those below. At this point they would eat up all their reserves, and hinterlands. Then when nothing could keep it working, the culture would collapse completely. As there would be no food anywhere nearby, the entire culture of that place would disappear, and the survivors would simply found a new, more egalitarian way of life somewhere else. He was quite convincing with this case using Cahokia, where he was the prominent expert in the field, and the evidence is quite strong now that this was the case. The Teotehuacan hierarchy may have survived somewhat transmuted as the Aztec, or some other aristocracy, its case is not so cut and dried. He hinted that the Maya may also prove to be a similar case, and since he has left us, the case has become pretty solid that the Maya just threw the culture away but are still using many of the same walled orchards, built long ago, today.
This gives me much hope, for I saw us as more like the Cahokian model, but without the ability to escape back to the hinterland and the wilderness. Our culture is so profoundly large, and impacts this planet so universally, that this class helped me see another way that we are meeting a grave new challenge never seen before. Next social collapse, there will be nowhere to leave to. This paradigm also pointed out the degree to which our culture has a built in addiction to frontiers, and that the frontier of human endeavor had transformed historically with the close the physical frontier of earth’s lands.
This lesson was bolstered by my simultaneously taking Anthro 101, and was thrown in sharp contrast by Intro to International Relations (the other IR), Poli Sci 175. A professor whose name I prefer to forget thought that the concept of hegemony was deep, and important, and the greatest thing since sliced bread. I may have been more inclined to agree with him were his intent to teaching hegemony less akin to Kissinger’s intent in practicing it. This semester is when I discovered my true enemy was hierarchal socio-political power, not the hierarchy itself, but the concept of its legitimacy.
So that was my first semester at UWM, formative. Then I went to Madison.
There were four courses that had a great impact on me individually, and one semester when three courses combined to cover the three sides of the golden triangle. These all were part of my focus on the political history of the peoples of our world.
The two most important of these seven were focused on biology and the history of science.
The first of the four was Poli Sci 209, Issues in Political Thought. The issue for the semester was the history of words used to identify political ideologies. In this class I came to understand that disparate modern ideologies had all started as something that I believed in strongly, but that over time the vagaries of political power had twisted the discourse until it was impossible to use these words to have meaningful discussion of the concepts that they represent. This is because they each have so many different meanings to different people. It helped me understand how skewed modern American political discourse is, and why it is so difficult to discuss politics meaningfully in the US. This formed the basis of my ability to define my very simple anarkic beliefs, regardless of my audiences’ understanding of ideological terms.
The theme of Chinese, and Asian religious cultures, that also spanned these years, contributed much to my ability to discuss my spiritual beliefs, which were emerging from my atheism at the same time.
The other Poli Sci course that had great impact was Poli Sci 654, Politics of Revolution. I’d always wanted to see myself as a revolutionary, this course helped me sort thru what is wrong and what is right with the revolutions that have occurred so far. One of the best parts of it was that we looked closely at what causes revolution; what factors were always present, and which, not being present, prevent effective change regardless of the need. The perception of the possibility of positive change appears to be the most important predisposition towards people changing their world. This concept has had a profound impact on me and it has grown stronger and more refined over time.
Two science courses had a profound impact on me in ways that go beyond science to political and spiritual understandings that have remained important to me. The prior semester had laid some foundations for this. Three classes covered different sides of the infamous golden triangle at the same time; this really helped me achieve a good overview of modern western history. Poli Sci 260, Intro to Latin America, and Afroamer 277 Intro to Africa really helped me understand how eurocentric culture has in fact created underdevelopment, and that it is sustained by the state department and other institutions that have inherited the mantle of the wealth and power of the eurocentric economic worldview. The other class I had that semester is hard to describe, for it was an interdisciplinary look at the evolution of western culture, science, technology, and philosophy. Integrated Liberal Studies 202 II was full of expansive ideas and charted the interrelation of what we see as different fields of study, and how they have become fragmented over time. All three of these classes spent the same two weeks on the period of the golden triangle. At the end of this time I realized that I had acquired a quite a broad and comprehensive view of western history, from within it’s philosophical core, and in it’s context of other cultures.
The take home lesson for this semester: when an ancient Greek used the word teknos, he was discussing not only how, and with what, but also why. We have divorced our reason from itself; we do not ask why we design science, technology, and philosophy. They have all become ancillaries to earning money, which motive is unquestioned. That this is the essential goal of our culture (earning more money for/by those who already have much of it), and our biggest barrier to good politics, science, and technology, was beginning to become apparent to me, but it was the history of science that straightened me out for good. I clearly remember History of Science 101, but my transfer transcripts contain no reference to it. It was near the end of this class, which was a broad overview of the rise of modern science over the last few centuries, that I realized that a good portion of the technical difficulties we are having with survival on earth has come from a changing of the priorities and motives for science, research, and technical development over the years.
What originally was a grand enterprise to improve the human condition and grow closer to God by understanding his world better has become mainly harnessed to the capitalist profit motive. There are many small reasons for this, and collectively they are quite substantial. This changed my core understanding, until then I saw all political problems as essentially being solvable by technical solutions.
Now I see that all technical problems require political solutions.
Information Resources at SOIS UWM, and My Four Core Competencies:
This brings me to the second half of my course work, a focus on the teknos of solutions to political problems. Entering the SOIS, I had the advantage of seeing technology not as object, but as process implying a purpose. I also had the advantage of knowing the power of information and knowledge to transform our world, as well as knowing the importance information access for everyone has to the world. Though I could only see at the time that I would rather study information use generally than any given field, I have found in IR studies the answers the first half of my studies had sent me looking for.
I felt simultaneously well updated and at home in my first semester back at UWM, in the IR program at SOIS. In L&I SCI 632 and L&I SCI 110 there was much discussion about the ethics of information use. We covered the need for intellectual property security, and the digital divide. These discussions helped bring my focus on socio-political issue back into focus. Class discussion in these classes did more to help me comprehend the current state of these issues more than any other materials could have. These two classes rounded out the competency I brought back to school with me. This is a basic, broad humanities background with a view of the context of our past, but a focus on current and future needs. I have rounded out this competency with the addition of PEACE ST 201, Intro to Conflict Resolution, we studied conflict and it’s resolution. There was a real relevance here in that the digital divide and the information economy were important topics of the class. William Ury’s “Getting to Peace” was an excellent text that put a larger context to our cultural development. His essential argument was that we have returned to the expandable economic pie of our ancestors who were hunter-gatherers as a result of the knowledge economy. He places blame for violence among humans largely on the limited economic resources of the agricultural revolution. Like a hunter gather economy, but more so, the resources that matter in the knowledge revolution expand when shared, instead of shrinking like land and water do when shared. Ury is famous for his work as a corporate consultant and mediator. This socio-economic competence is formative and central to me. There are three other competencies that I value very much, it is easier to discuss them while discussing the second half of my course work, which is mostly in IR. In a word each: research, project management, and web implementation. My preexisting artistic bent has enjoyed flourishing particularly in web implementation and design.
The core competency that I value having expanded in SOIS, is the ability to do research. In L&I Sci. 210, Foundations of University Library Research, I learned how to research and document a good college paper. I had acquired a pretty good sense for how to write a paper, but this course covers material every student should know about how to use reference materials better to do research and to document it.
In L&I SCI 330, Electronic Info Retrieval, and L&I SCI 510, Intro to Reference Services and Resources, my ability to do research was expanded and solidified. The ability to find the information one needs is the most important skill today in my opinion. In all three of these course’s, databases, the Internet, and practice, were far more powerful than any books that could have been assigned. The familiarity I gained with the use of a reference library is invaluable to me, and was given uncommon depth, for a baccalaureate, by the addition of L&I SCI 681, Using Archives: The Value of Primary Sources in the Information Age. This course is about managing and organizing archives. One of its focuses was about basic marketing issues, this helped complete the course of thought began with L&I SCI 640, Information Marketing. This class was primarily about marketing information; the focus was on marketing free library resources to the public in an information economy. As this course was one of my first IR courses, it set a course of questioning that I followed throughout these following courses, comprising what I call the engineering, or development, competency.
One of the few courses that had books that I thought were instrumental to me was, L&I SCI 310, Human Factors of Info Seeking and Use. This course was essentially a study of usability. As someone who has an interest in universal info access, it was very instructive to study the methods of measuring and ameliorating usability problems. There were two books in this class that left an impression on me. The first was “Don’t Make Me Think”, almost a new type of book, being easy to skim and navigate; it was the best example I’ve ever seen for Steve Krug’s points about web design in book form. Donald Norman’s “Things that Make Us Smart” was all about how the focus of the information technology should be on conforming it to human needs, as opposed to the recent historical trend of adapting human behavior to the machines. To function, the knowledge economy technology needs to make us smarter. Tools that are not easily handled by the human mind don’t makes us smart as effectively.
To further bolster this engineering, or product development, focus, it was instructive to have three other courses in addition. L&I SCI 250, Internet Planning & Implementation, taught me how to build an enterprise scale intranet, and introduced the concept of project management, and working in groups. PM techniques were expanded upon and given depth and context in L&I SCI 340, Information Architecture II. Here we learned about basic PM tools and techniques. This was a good course for understanding information projects in the context of a modern corporate culture that is aware of the need for good project management. In L&I SCI 490, Senior Capstone, we put PM methods and tools into use in a group project of design and implementation of a scripted website.
The capstone class also capped off experience and formal study in the remaining competency, interactive web design and implementation. This is the competency that I most enjoy exercising and learning, because it satisfies my creative and artistic self. In L&S 110, we were introduced to HTML markup. I was delighted to design my first web page in this class, and this carried over into L&I SCI 240, Information Architecture I, where we learned a lot about HTML and learned some JavaScript as well. We also learned about CSS and other kinds of templates. L&I SCI 440, Information Architecture III, expanded this scripting background; we designed ASP and PHP interactive web applications that worked with databases. There were several good texts covered in these courses, but the best sources were web based, like Webmonkey.com, and W3C pages.
Future Directions:
Designing web implementations gave me ideas that may bring all these competencies back together. I am working out some ideas I have for how web applications can be used to automate some of the work of group self governance. On the surface the concept is no more than a survey, but it is hyper survey. A web application could make it much easier, and more democratic, to share opinions and decisions. Just for beginners, we could rank the questions to order them by value, and share each other’s answers. Most important, the web environment will enable more ease of rewording of proposed questions and the posting new questions by participants. All in all, there is much room to improve communication, expression, and decisions, on political matters in the online environment. There are security issues that I find hard to solve simply, without the use of nominal Paypal payments, or some other such conceptually inappropriate use, but they are not intractable to a fair solution, and new solutions will arise organically.
A similar idea is to use cooperative effort to compile useful link lists to serve the peoples’ expanding need for coherence in the flood of data. A multi-axis system of categories and rankings could be combined with user inputs and valuations. This could enable the finding, and listing, of links in a number of different criteria simultaneously, with a ranking along a spectrum of each criterion. In this way one could search for just the right level of knowledge at the intersection of several interests. Some of these axes (political radicalism, or left-right spectrum, as opposed to the freedom-safety spectrum, or scientific radical-conservative spectrum) would be more subjective and geared towards values, trust, and taste. XML, which was the topic of my independent study, L&I SCI 399, is a markup that would make a good platform core for these types of applications.
My focus on universal empowerment through knowledge access has been brought much empowerment itself, in the form of these three other competencies. Research, product development, and web implementation, are well bundled here to perform the job I have assigned myself. It is my job to help all I can to ensure that these possibilities are used to help us all, for our boat is now to small for us to survive historic levels of collective individual selfishness. The new frontier is knowledge automation, but good results there are right next door to everyone, truly this is a new kind of new frontier. Clearly this frontier is in many ways the most open ever in terms of possibilities. I have confidence in our ability to build a sustainable knowledge economy, for the possibilities are limited only by our imagination. Yet I am concerned, for Politics of Revolution has taught me that we will not change our ways unless we perceive that we are able, and there is much in our socio-economic system that argues that we are helpless before it. We are not, however, helpless before it, it is we. Whether we know, or care, or not, every one of us changes and defines our culture, every day.
Currently I see my future in self employment as a webmaster while also working in the non-profit sector and/or knowledge industry. It is my dream to work with the national Green Party web team while working for Google. In both cases I would seek to work on ideas like the two cited above. Ultimately I would like to work in consulting and as a webmaster, while creating a game site out of the Science Fiction Utopian novel I’ve been working on. I would like to find a way to express my artistic urges in the meantime, so I am thinking about studies in computer imagery. In the meantime I intend to spend my summer learning Macromedia.
it was asked again, which seems so seldom, and apparently there was a new concise version to be revealed, yet another onion layer,
“By the way, what is this “Allness” stuff? Another flaky new-age feel good cultist wanna-be group or religion? Well, if it is a religion, I guess it is no worse than the others.
Rick Wilhelm
To utter Allnessness, level 5, universal wonderment!”
monte letourneau to RICK
yea, my cult! only one sheep allowed per shepherd, oneself.
so it’s kinda about one’s personal relation to the All, and the greatness
of the collective being grace within one. the one within one, as it were.
kind of gnostic, i respect the words of Lao Tzu above any others, and
feel the greatest historical sympathy with our native consensus based
spirits.
i really don’t think i’ve been revealed the words to explain it well to you.
the core concepts of my spiritual path are particle physics and cosmology.
those with a spiritual questing who follow well the logic of these sciences
often follow well my spiritual philos, which can sometimes also make sense to
those who are students of philosophy, especially if well versed in the
fundamental sciences, and open to a variety religious concepts.
it is almost by definition not a religion,
it is my own path to words i am comfortable using.
a cult of one.
the main rites are things like looking up at a full moon and loving
it’s beauty while returning my fluids to the earth, Loving my lover,
making the most of food i’ve helped grow, and in general artfully,
fully, passionately, living each moment gracefully, fully in the cycle
carnate (no soul, reincarnation, or after death).
hard core materialist science proves well the miracle of existing,
that Allness’s Grace and Love is.
i am a hard core materialist, i desire to deny the splitting of
material and spirit.
as well, i believe the brain evolved to choose good,
and that the most apt word for the concept of evil is stupid.
given the possibilities of the infinte in time and space,
it is not that far fetched to imbue All with the ability to evolve a
completely transcendant being, independant of localization in time or
space.
wither she be yet or not, then she will always have been here now
and you are an inextricable part of It’s evolution.
that which we are allowed to know her most intimately, at this time,
in, is Earth.
you might say that Gea is a minor goddess, or an archangel to me, or,
I am a Gaen, but it only approximates the truth – as does all i have
written here.
.
which seems much in the spirit, now that i review the letter, of your
“universal wonderment”, a stage beyond which it is not yet mine see.
I CONSIDER MYSELF A CONSENSUS,
OF SEVERAL LEVELS OF EVOLUTION AND BRAIN STRUCTURE
the bi-cameral/hemispheric minds
THE EGO IS A SENSORY INTERFACE ILLUSION,
IT IS SO NOT REALLY THERE
there is never really an i,
it is always really we
we keep it in the back of our “subconscious” those things we have chosen to forget
no one is really ever alone in there, anywhere, anytime
and all states are available to the mind of that self,
that are availble to any component
i believe that our evolution, and survival, depend on finding the common ground, and a reconciliation,
of cultural norms and systems of understanding.
from prehistoric roots of language, ancient, and historic culture, and post-modern science,
must emerge a common understanding.
we are beginning to understand the brain’s complexity, how mind emerges from that, our history,
our evolution, and our universe on many new levels.
this century will bring ways to sift and winnow our understandings beyond current imagination
and ecological problems, created by social problems beyond our understanding.
We have the information to solve our problems, and the imagination to enact solutions,
but we lack an agreement on what the problems are, and what solutions are desirable.
we must forge a consensus on the meaning of life, as quickly as we learn the details of life.
we have the tools to understand things that have escaped us due to their complexity,
things like our minds, and the chemistry of collected living bodies.
i expect us to find wisdom in old ways that have been seeming lost,
and knowledge of what it is to be human, and how.
this must crystallize into a more rapidly evolving, more effective, more widely shared
consensus on how to be human, and how to be earthlings.
a more universal, more adaptable, system for encoding our information into understanding, and actions
will grow alongside the technologies that will provide a much more complete encoding of our world
into information.
to get on down our path, we must know, and be, more godly, more human, and more earthly.
more deeply material, less shallowly materialistic
science, religion, and magic will each find the value of the other
they will be reconciled, indeed, we must become more human, we must know ourselves and our past;
we must return to the root, to bring water and nutrient to the branches
we will then each be our own branch of learning, creating the understanding to foster the growth of all.
my evolving spirit-view’s basis is Love,
understanding, propagating, expanding, explaining, Love.
it is the greatest mystery,
understanding of which brings greatest Being,
and makes the greatest beings
(i used to think it was Truth, when i was younger and dumber)
we have studied hate far past it’s usefulness, surely we can agree on that?
in sooth i revere, above all else, Earth, and Love.
Gravity is the Allness’s Love.
Earth is our place to beautify the Allness,
for us all to co-evolve allness in.
Truth and Grace define Beauty.
Beauty, Love, Truth, Earth and the Allness, are plenty of Reason for every being Being
We all share one soul, it is why we are here,
to be here
to being the All into being, to create, expand, evolve Her
soul, psychic energy, magical power, inspiration, meaning, is somehow conserved
as is mass and energy, to which conservation this is somehow enjoined
if only by our lack of knowing why.
the best theoretical physicists now speak of conservation of information,
an emergent property of data, which itself is a property emerging from positions of mass/energy,
as it emerges from spacetime.
all properties of existance seem to arise as an emergent property of spacetime’s very existing.
each new level of complexity emerging into ever more levels of complexity
are meaning, thinking, and Soul that much different?
i believe all past lives are part of all present ones.
thought, divination, and meaning itself are some of the many manifestations of this conservation
and these two are intimately linked, by the flowing of their parts between them,
the melding of one into the other.
it is not the dominance of one part or another,
but the dance of moving energies or vibrations back and forth between the parts,
that make for the purpose, the pleasure, the very existence, of individuals, and of the whole.
This is the spiritual reason why sexual union is, to me, one of the most magical of acts,
universally, and, in particular, to me.
our different understandings of the universe somehow work upon similar principles,
conserving truth and meaning, whether encoded in the stars, or our DNA,
to be read from the molecular structures, or from the cast of die,
if any one, or some, can just divine the form, the code, the key to meaning
and these concepts are some of the traditional basis of magic, and some of science
both of which can be religions, personal paths of spirit,
or illusions whisked away in the winds of time.
Some aspects of reason are provable, some unproven, some stubbornly unprovable; forever?
why we are here?
to be here
?
why do we love?
to love
?
why not?
these two are most intimately related
as the sun, the fire, the food, the luck in the hunt, the thought, the progeny, the word,
the power, lovers entwined, and lines of descent entangled.
science can only prove so much, the spiritual proof is that which is not to be replicated,
but can only be experienced by one; leading not to theories, but to beliefs.
since i always look for outside confirmation, deeply influenced by my first religion, science,
lovemaking becomes where i am most likely to find what appears to be a confirmation of
another’s reality and understanding, and my emergent ‘beliefs’.
two meaning systems, two views, two minds
in contrast, conflict, and in concert,
exchanging energies, loves, and world views, on the most intimate of levels.
We can never really know the mind, or the reality, of any other.
but when you are feeling you feel what another feels
you short circuit the mental systems that deny certainty.
we all feel the same feelings in very much the same way;
all humans use the same chemistry, and similar structures, to experience feelings.
indeed, we share much of this experience and equipment with all mammals,
and much of that is shared with reptiles, less fish, even less other animals.
still, hunger, smell, sex, decision making, all animals share these modes of being,
and experience them through very similar mechanisms.
One may surmise that the experiencing itself must also be very similar.
when one looks in a dog’s eye, one feels that the dog has feelings,
yet one never really absolutely knows the mind of their own twin
opening one’s mind to experiencing the magical flow of energy embodied in lovemaking
brings one as close to certitude as possible in the belief that one shares thoughts with another.
properly matched and understood, lovers may also experience the flow of energies
between entities, the dance of being at the elemental level.
however they conceive to understand this, there is to be found a proof of the underlying reality.
we are all connected, we are all one, we are bound to life, and empowered therein,
by Love, Meaning, Truth, Grace, and understandings
the smallest consensus is two, the most basic of consensus realities.
besides sheer coincidence itself (which is all magic, science, soul, or spirit really are),
as i touch it, in gaming, with dice (my first big hint), and synergy of meaning,
the other places i find meaning, like using the I-Ching, and sexual love,
are intimately entwined with my mind and my perception, indistinguishable from faith and illusion.
but some larger patterns, like astrology (for me), show the connectedness of meanings.
minds evolved to discern patterns, sometimes a coincidence is flagged instead.
hence the tendency of the less rigorous reasoning to find meaning everywhere.
while personal meanings may well be found everywhere, they are not shared with other entities.
discrimination is necessary to find meaning that may be shared, so lacking discrimination
is in contrast with healthy human skepticism, for we are social animals, unable to survive alone,
requiring some degree of consensus in our understandings.
however, some measure of belief, a failure of logic, but maybe not reason, is necessary to us all,
especially in the definition of purpose, direction, desire, joy, and fear.
some complex systems seem definitely to reside outside us
sustained by odd reasoning beyond our grasp as individuals
but with meanings and patterns to be derived from complex systems of meaning
painstakingly built by our fore bearers, and continuously added to
things like astrology, numerology, bibliomancy, tarot, runes, religions and other systems of magic.
many have been struck with the similarity much of modern science bears to these previous attempts.
which many also believe have been replaced by the sciences.
quantum dynamics, like astrology, is different than much of the rest, at least for me…
these seem to be confirmed by the passage of my time
to me these things, like other humans, seem more likely to be ‘real’
to be out there, proving themselves at a distance, not affected by how we see, or what we think.
i’m sure that’s how advocates of my most hated of such systems,
that i believe exist only in their own darkly twisted minds, see their explanation systems also.
i believe systems are less dark, and less hate-able,
when the view is flex-able, and amendable by further understandings.
i don’t feel fixed realities are ‘truth’,
they do not reflect the impetus towards evolving that i see in the Allness.
nor it’s need for Love, deep reverance, respect and Grace.
so, i’ve come to believe that truth actually is neither objective nor subjective,
with one soul, conserved by All, truth is found in a consensus reality,
always expandable by new kinds of being and meanings.
i feel this understanding emerges from our experiences,
it is incomplete, and tentative, but, like science, astrology, and divination,
it makes things more easily understood, or at least comprehended, and explained.
the Soul, Allnessing, Beauty, Truth, even earth, gravity, and mind,
each individual part, the whole, and life itself are all emergent properties of being –
things that stem from the fact of existence, whatever it’s ‘real’ form.
all these systems of finding deeper truths seem alien when first encountered,
but when time’s passing seems to confirm them, they seem to become more concrete,
until one can no longer imagine otherwise.
Quantum dynamics’ mathematics are some of the most beautifully twisted pieces of logic
that will ever be.
no less, or more, so than many others that seem to describe the nature of things well,
by allowing us to manipulate her on a deeper, higher, and or bigger, level than before;
to live more well, to evolve, to understand and find meaning.
as were the birthing of spiritual and magical logics before.
the best reasoning we have ever posited all depends on
“because it looks that way to us” which seems more powerful than “it looks that way to me”
but each system is composed of many small changes, each originally only state-able by one
the wisest wise men know, not only that they do not know it all,
but what it is we can never know, and what we may someday understand.
as we enter a century where the most important frontier will be understanding complexity,
especially how the mind emerges from the brain’s interaction with life,
we will find out more about what can and cannot be known, what meaning can and cannot be,
by learning more about what knowing is, and how we derive meaning.
presumably, the more we learn about learning, the better we will get at it.
but the big question (why?) will never change.
only the how will evolve, but now how is poised to at least show us why we ask why, and how we find answers and meanings.
Lao tzu
the wise Tao doesn’t know
meets
god grant me what i may change, forbearance of what i can’t, and wisdom to know the difference
meets
science, life, art, and massless media
emerging
into a better, expanding, more evolved consensus reality, produced by better understanding,
producing better understandings, accelerating earth’s evolving.
even the disintegration of professional capital ownership,
and other exploitation by misappropriation of our common inheritance,
under the crush of it’s own effects, can only free our minds to see
(unless we allow humanity to disintegrate with it), that everything has plenty reason to be.
all paths lead to the emergence of Allness
pleasure in growing is what gives life meaning
humans are the last ones who should ask what is the meaning of life,
for us it is too find meaning in life, asking why is questioning the meaning of meaning.
meaning emerges from existence, like existence, it is.
one may question the nature of existence, but not it’s existence
existence is, is-ing is what it does! i.e. is is! beings are, being is.
It sounds like nonsense, because it is the answer to a nonsense question, sense is sensible; it just is.
likewise, one may question one’s understanding of meaning
but whether life has meaning? meaning is defined by living!
emergence, evolution, mind, and meaning, are,
like existence, simply, miraculously, being!
each, like us each, an integral, inseparable part of the whole
the Allness knows the meaning, the purpose, the principles,
of each individual, as a part of giving meaning to the whole
it is the meaning, and it’s knowledge will hold all.
Allness knows all, but it really knows naught, it does all, it is all, it is more fundamental than knowledge.
we cannot be all the Allness, so we need neither understand, or be, more than we can.
nor may we,
but we can know that to question, to answer, to give ourselves the illusion of understanding meaning
is an important part of what is our reason to be.
Love, Grace, Truth, these are simply things that make life be, and for which it is worth being a life.
meaning derives from the universal quest, the evolution of meanings
existence exists to be, it’s not so complicated. life lives to live, evolution emerges to evolve.
this first piece is from 1990, i recently titled it Our mother
and used it as the start point of :
Devi’s work’s created for public
“reading” (the focal word meaning in Herstory lessons this week).
late preherstoric “writers” crafted meaning in written words,
one
“letter” (conflicted meanings warning; or, character)
at
a
time!
the devi herself was no exception in the early 21st century:
Our Mother Who’s Arts’ We Are Parts
A spinning garden jewel glistening in the void
The evolving beauty of her incipient brain lost
in idling cancerous malignancy
I stand before the goddess of my ancestors
Begging forgivance my innocence
A steady gaze in her eye
We know I’ll all ways love her
With each no choice but to do as we do
With all I can do I offer
“this life to stop the extinction”
offering left on the altar of my heart
“walk forth from this place of desecration
we will eat the pain with our smiles
our tears will turn the path green
in our struggles to be freely
we will a place of beauty
in our faces we hold truth and peace
spinning thru the galaxy sowing seed
to bloom in health we will be without end”
Art
and there out of the ashes of art
will rise like a big happy fart
a new health a new self a new state of being
a new stealth a new wealth a new way of seeing
a new day a new way to be a sage
and quicken the place
a new way to bring out another age
in a state of grace
a shiny new enlightened stage
to be realities’ new page
a new world a new state of phase
a new sight a new like a new kind of race
a new flight a new tyke a new state of grace
a new upward a new load to bear
a new inward a new way to share
to return to the place of the crown of culture
pushing on outward to space
to be civil I’d guess
a new way to treat I & you and relations between
with a blend of old meanings where beauty can be seen
a new life a new breath and a look in between
if we are to see
all the 21st century
the most meaning full art
will have to be
3 rules of revolution:
3.everything you do is important and is your valid domain
4.everything anyone does is important and a valid domain of your study
5.if you’re not having more fun your not more revolving
the revolution’s never done
the restoration never rests
the reformation always fails to choose
viva la re-evolution!!!
Her Prayers:
Our mother
who art in earth
hallowed be thy rain
Our will be one
her will be done
To make heaven on our good earth
Our mother
beginning’s berth
let us relieve our pain
The time has come
to get things done
In our sights is the end of dearth
Our mother
who’s art is birth
renew what’s been slain
Our mother
for all that she’s done
we offer thankfulness
Warlords are done
peace’s time has come
We have no more use for the gun
Our mother
who sustains our life
know we can, and must now,
end all strife
We are all one
archons’ reign is done
To heaven’s reign we are berth
Psalm I - Litany
Thanx for vinegar and salt
Thanx for a bit of wheat, hops, and malt
That there should be
H2O
And that it knows
Where to flow
Thanx for dioxygen
Dihydrogen
Or either alone
And for what you do
Thank you
CO2
Thanx for sky
A place called home
The earth inside
With room to roam
flowers may have petals
thanks to all the metals
like iron and potassium
with the salt of sodium
to balence our fluidity
to keep the water in
by providing our skin
carbon keeps it all together
protecting us from weather
and covers our nudity
For phosphorus and calcium
In every bone
And thank you nitrogen
For all we’ve grown
Thank you sun
Thank you chlorophyll
For what’s done
For you carbo fill
Nucleic acids
Are oh so nice
When you kids
Twine them ’round twice
That mass and energy
Should dance so divine
Thank you
Oh thank you!
Spacetime
space so far
for room to think
in every direction,
Thanx also time,
time to think
Thus able to mind
Prayer
prayer is how we treat your body and mine
it’s the life we will have to see
to have a future where we will be
prayer is how and why we seek for our kind some more time
peace cooperation and blessings will be all that can get done
when our new age has begun
our love will hit a peak
when no confinement by death has been won
and there is heaven under the sun
we will have all that we seek
Favorite one liners and such:
We’re optomists, not stupid
Paranoia will die!
Galactic consciousness now
Rainforest is genengine
Genengine rainforest
Radital = rad it all
DISSEMINATE!!!
Simple bodies evolve intelligence in complex environments
Complex bodies evolve simple minds in simple environments
Synchronicity increases with increase in the number of levels at which complexity arises in an environment
Everything is everything [everything is everything - everything is everything - everything is everything]
some of this last section needs some work,
i have too many versions of the litany laying about on hard drives they all get weak at the end
so far my favorite part of the entire story is Basil before the court:
“human, the source of all earth’s problems.
they expect the being of supremeness to fix what they broke,
it bespeaks the greatest hubris.”
Basil frampton, ‘coon, 2nd immortal, the companion, when asked if he could use the word hubris in a sentence during the inquisition. Basil Raccoon’s Favorite Phrase - “jelly donut cannons rule”
That, and her being a solar wind and laser sailing flutterby, where devi really gets to stretch her wings, before becoming the beam herself. Moving at light-speed is natch when being light.
Somebody’s got to be the first to be most awesome, to bad she tripped up the timelines, and had to join the Galactic Revolution.
Under the Wormhole, seriously underground, fleeing through time, back to the source.
of course that was all before (well, and after, of course)
she had to make the locker
after that the story/ our past/ her future just keeps getting darker, and that’s it for now folks.
much love,
Devi Jones’ Locker, still mostly in my head
i cannot give you your freedom
and i cannot take it away
but i will blog all night
for your right to freely express
there are times when they come in the night,
and they come in the day with unimaginable weaponry
and they massacre, and the unimaginative, and the trusting, and the compassionate
and sometimes just everyone,
are just gone
while we may, let’s make hey!
connectedness, community, and wisdom
are ever more accessible
for the picoradiolinked sensorchip parallel computing networks smart dust (and these links are ancient)
of the very near future will know all and see all
and we had better be ready to share it
so live in the light, live in the open
share a solidarity of community
or be first on the cattle cars when
some botnets evolve sentience
and the one in charge buys all the corps
and fires us all
only love and hope can prevent us from being
supeceded by our own machinations
offering instead, to humanize machination
to embody it in wisdom
to bring it back to the whole technologia
by sharing decisions enough that they are
decided by those who care, and are most affected
the real stakeholders all need a say,
and to decide we all need all the info
either way privacy will die
the built environment will become programable
all our best technologia will be grown
and the bug on the windowsill will have eyes
that see the world from all three angles
narrator, subject, object
someone will soon know the world inside out
i feel strongly that one should be ALLOFUS!
otherwise surely not wise
together we can form Gea a much higher mind
we come together in spaces like this more easily
and with more frequency
while most of the peoples’ content and bandwidth
is filled with the drival of peoples’ lives
that is the goal, the objective is for all to have a soap box
all to have a voice, and all to have a choice
and no little puny subterfuge like Dieboldly voting machines
and a few badley stolen, suposedly public, elections,
will ever really change that
when the people realize the chips are down and it’s time to play our cards
and how rare and beautiful us beingness on Earth is
but mostly people never do anything about a problem
untill they can really see it coming, and where the solution is going
this is why we must more fully share the truths of our consensus reality
i am relatively well versed in the readings of several traditions i have a hard time comparing modern neo-wiccans to other older traditions that have left us a written record
it is very interesting to me that archaeology is finally giving us a picture of celtic culture and druids but wicca as it was practiced is a relatively solitary, very preliterate practice, best found in old midwives tales
so generally, when i speak of wicca, it is something that i consider an abstract unattainable dead thing
but if you want brand new and growing, alive and dynamic, modern neopagans are great, if you hang with the ones’ who you think use some level of reasonable reasoning
but it helps me feel the main things of all traditions that connection that i know is there with my tribal ancestors
and the roots of euro traditions in prehistory
it is all about sensual, beingness, communalness, the allness
modern monotheism denies respectful familiarity with the visceral to it’s own debility and to the debility of our world and every one of us a connectedness to the earth mother, and Allness, implies or enables a more sensuous connectedness with pleasure, and each other.
but the real thing to me, Sufi Mystic, Taoist magician, and Hindu ascetic aside, what really matters to me on the spiritual level of transmissible, recordable, culture, is to be found in all the aboriginals the “native” peoples’ cultures all value consesus, and love, and compassion, and humanity, the visceral, vital, joy of the great implacable Allness
since my practice is here, and my methods, materials, and places, are all native, (at least the plants animals and human here are all natives now, and have been adapted to by the native cultures) more and more often, if you really make me pin it down my religion is American Indian, but that does not exist anglo culture has always tried to conglomerate tribal cultures, first into each other, and then into the anglo culture
but tribal culture evolves at the band level and everyone is a member of at least one clan
connectedness arises again
clans have the rhythm of the year, and the rhythm of one’s life stages, and the rhythm of the moon, and this helps exlplain the rythms of life within, without, and all around you even the speech that connects our minds with each other and concepts that match all around us rhythms
ceremonies that connect you to the changing, and implacably fixed rythms of Allness rythms of your own movements, and actions, and thier relations to the rythms of those around you, and with all of beingness such that one perceives one’s life as dancing not even a dance, a dancing the primitive mind is built differently, better for the future, than the immediate past the dance of beingness is more appropriate to the expanding pie, horizotally structured, consensus, infosphere technologia we must be building
every memory easily retrieved from the place it came from and fitting into all the others in a rational, alive, growing, and evolving whole living in nested sets of individuals’ collectives and thier collected various greater groupings rhythm to the connections between clans, bands, tribes, and nations the marriages of enemies blending thier wills softening hatreds real cultural evolution that really still works so much better than the capitalist industrialist
it’s more fun for us easier on Earth more of godness and goodness to be primal beings
Now hosted on my account here at: http://www.dot5hosting.com/, these sites were done almost entirely in Notepad, and were managed with FileZilla FTP.
There are some broken link errors, and probably other minor PHP scripting issues, caused when i moved them from the root of this directory.
2003; my first commercial site, for my sister’s business, now defunct, @ http://montesite.net/os/r2/home.html. This would have been much easier to build in a scripted user managed space like this one, but, unaware, I built it in raw html with well over 100 hand coded pages. The shopping cart worked back when we had a live paypal account.
2004; second commercial site, for local rapper Lil’ Dude, @ http://montesite.net/os/lildude/index.php. I started this one in php with a mind towards being able to add more functionality down the line, nonetheless it still remained largely an html based site. Not only has the artist changed his name, but they have since decided to go without a website of their own. In 2008 he set up a more modern page at http://lildude.net/home.html. It has been good for me to see this young man’s career progress apace, he has worked with many talented music biz veterans. Some errors result from my header and footer for montesite.net being moved without being adjusted.
2004; school project, and my first venture into really scripting, http://montesite.net/os/epiall/epiall.html.
I was very happy with this simple execution of a multiaxis reference system for links, a type of system that i feel is badly in need of wider use to allow people to navigate complexly organized and voluminous sets of data in more meaningful and efficient ways according to their current needs.
The assignment was to execute certain scripts within i-frames.
The content was never filled out, and I never got around to making the submission forms
work in the current environment, but it felt very much like a creative success nonetheless.
2005; school project, and my first screen capture video tutorial, http://montesite.net/os/tutorial/index.php.
This is a tutorial about using ftp to access your UWM webspace,
it became obsolete the next semester when they migrated to a more user friendly environment,
this was quite a disappointment since i’d thought i’d finally done something that would actually help others. Some errors result from my header and footer for montesite.net being moved without links being adjusted.
2005; montesite.net vers 1: @ http://montesite.net/os/, I never really finished it, or fleshed out all the content I had envisioned, but it served as a great place to store content and links.
2007; Southway Bait Sales @ http://southwaybaitsales.com/home.htm. Definitely the pinnacle of my hand coding work, I spent ages getting the look and feel I wanted. Unfortunately it still does not function as intended. The creation of a linked bank and Pay-Pal account, a retail price and shipping cost structure, and the editing of an old VHS vid, took so long that we lost the password and the will to recover it.
Still hoping to whip this into functioning shape with the very minimal work it would take to make the paypal links work and post the best i could do with the vid edits. For now it makes one heck of a catalogue and business card. Like so many of my hand coded commercial sites, I took far too long making the design work for myself. Surely I hope to never belabor the art like this again, despite the fact that I enjoy it.
I take pride in graphic design work, but my efforts with Joomla have yet to obtain such a focus on the details of look and feel. In Joomla and Drupal, like any CMS or web app, the look and feel are controlled by off the rack CSS based templates that I have yet to modify or study in any depth, as i am still busy adding functions and content. I understand CSS, as we had to study it in school, but I never took to it like raw HTML, though it is the simplest of markup coding.
