Welcome, indeed!

It's been some time since my personal web site's been posted — the old site, databear.com, is still archived in the "Wayback Machine."

After some years of overambition, I've gone back to simple — as I think of new things to say, I'll add them.

"You'll go blind if you keep doing that!" It goes without saying that I spend entirely too much time staring at words on the web, but then, when I was a kid I used to spend entirely too much time staring at words on the page. So, it stands to reason that after making my living for about 25 years by working with words on paper, I'd spend the past ten figuring out new ways to put words on a screen.

We all spend some time in school. I spent three years of my life at Stetson University, trying to learn chemistry, earning a B.S.

After that, I spent my late teens at the University of Florida, learning to write, mostly verse. Most of what I've written has been published by various small magazines, but I write very slowly. Still, the verse is important to me and well-received and I'm proud of it.

Later on, I succumbed to the spirit of the '80s and earned a business degree from Monmouth University.

The web hit me like a thunderbolt — the minute I saw Mosaic demonstrated back in '94, I knew it: "I want to do that." I began exploring web design in my old job and over a five-year period, I re-engineered myself from a science writer into a web developer. Along the way, I've developed and maintained scores of web pages and sites, for all kinds of purposes, developed and taught a slew of courses in HTML and web design, picked up some credentials.

Up until September 2000, I worked for Lockheed Martin, where pre-web, I'd been putting together contract performance reports on military contracts.

After Lockheed, I spent two and a half years working for an Internet service provider close to our house, enjoying a job where I can get home for lunch That was a convenient gig, and sure was exciting, as we hung on to our positions there by the skin of our teeth, watching the "dotcom" bubble burst around us.

Watching that company shrink day by day, I made my escape to my current position as webmaster for the the Research Institute the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Lately, I've been raiding my photo collection and organizing it on Flickr; new photos are going up there, too. I've been participating in Flickr's "365 Days" project — the exercise is turning out to be good for me, as it's letting me stretch some creative muscles.

I'm also keeping up a desultory Facebook wall (needs a login). I'm not much of a talker there, but I keep in touch with old friends and new there.

I've also posted photos and verse in a StumbleUpon blog. Might provide some insight into what I'm about.

I juggle some, three-ball, with just a couple of tricks. But I like tossing "exerballs" — not so much for the exercise, but because the extra weight makes the balls easier to control.