Well, if I'm going to write a blog entry a day for 30 days I had better start with something I know: Me.
I've been employed by The Sacramento Bee in various editing positions since October 1980. For 19 years I was the letters editor, responsible for the daily production of the newspaper's letters to the editor packages. It was a challenging job, but I was happy to give it up last July. Now I'm the production editor responsible for the editorial page. I help out the other two department production editors. In addition I'm supposed to be working on this project (ipsosacto.com ) to expand the opinion offerings at sacbee.com. I'll explain that topic later in the month. Suffice it to say that since I don't work for sacbee.com, and my boss doesn't work for sacbee.com, my influence at sacbee.com is not great.
My interest in computers appears to be genetic. My father worked on Illiac, one of the first mainframe computers, and later worked on the guidance system for the Apollo spacecraft , among other projects in a lengthy career. My brother has worked in computers since leaving high school. Today, he is a fellow with Sun Microsystems, specializing in storage encryption.
Unfortunately, I learned in high school that I hadn't inherited the math genes. But it wasn't until I was writing letters home from the USS Midway while on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin that I realized I'd picked up my mother's editing skill. From the Navy I went to college and on to gainful employment in newspapers.
I'm essentially self-taught when it comes to web development. I don't recall the exact year I purchased my first computer, but I remember it was a Kapro II, a portable computer about the size of a sewing machine. I taught myself the basics of Pascal, although I never did much with the knowledge. Today, I consider myself proficient in PHP and mySQL, with enough understanding of Apache to maintain a Ubuntu Linux server. (All of that is put to work here.) For my amusement, I'm currently teaching myself Python so that I can try out the Django web publication framework used by several newspapers.
That's enough for now. I need to pace myself if I'm going to last 30 days.
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