About Me

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Depending on who you talk to, I am a technical writer, tech marketing expert, competitive product analyst, or Übergeek.

My career has included:

  • A decade as the Technical Editor of CADENCE magazine, covering every aspect of the Computer Aided Design industry, specializing in in-depth product reviews.
  • A technical marketing manager at NVIDIA, managing reviews of the Quadro FX graphics cards and the PureVideo HD technology in consumer cards.
  • The competitive analyst at Yammer, where I helped teach the sales team how to win against bigger, well-known competitors.
  • A stint in hobby electronics e-tailing and manufacture (HamStop.com)

In the Internet community at large, however, I am perhaps most famous for authoring a silly little article about Web typography, which seems to have given me an enduring mention on the features page of WordPress.

In my personal life, I am an amateur radio operator (K6WEB) and am most interested in ham-related technologies that push the envelope.

My Ham Radio friends call me “Spidey”, while the regulars at my favorite bar call me “Radar”. Both nicknames are related, and you have to know me to understand why. ;-)

Writing about broken tech was always my passion. But my true calling is to design things that don’t need fixing.

I am also passionate about standards of all stripes, as I believe that their appropriate use can enhance the usability, advancement, and interoperability of all kinds of technology.

A pet personal project of mine is exploring the best ways to harmonize visual, tactile, and audible symbols for improving the effectiveness of alerting systems.

Favorite Quotations

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If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
—Henry Ford

What Do You Care What Other People Think?
—Arline Feynman to Richard P. Feynman

Non issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.
—Steve Jobs (to samcraig in response to the iPhone 4 antenna blocking problem)

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.
—Orson Welles

It’s not what we don’t know that hurts us, it’s what we know that ain’t so.
—Will Rogers

Men have become the tools of their tools.
—Henry David Thoreau

To innovate, you must ignore the common wisdom, and regard well-known things as less known, and much larger than before.
—Alan Cooper

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—Leonardo da Vinci

It takes five hundred small details to make one favorable impression.
—Cary Grant

Useless laws weaken necessary laws.
—Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.
— Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

The world is only changed by people who are naïve enough to think that they can change the world.
—Eric Lander (Aspen Ideas Festival, 2009-07-02)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
—George Bernard Shaw (in “Maxims for Revolutionists”)

Web Sites

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Wikipedia Contributions

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Draft Articles

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Articles Created

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Key radio communications

In chronological order:

  1. Mountain Locator Unit
  2. Coaxial power connector
  3. Cigarette lighter receptacle
  4. Electronic Industries Association of Japan
  5. Battery terminal
  6. Microphone connector
  7. U.S. Military connector specifications
  8. ICS 219
  9. Extended Channel Interpretation
  10. Plain language radio checks
  11. Aeronautical Code signals
  12. Maritime Mobile Service Q Codes
  13. 16-line message format
  14. ARRL Radiogram
  15. QN Signals
  16. FASTON terminal
  17. 1975 New York Telephone exchange fire
  18. Boker's Bitters
  19. Exchequer Standards
  20. Approximate measures
  21. North American Fire Hose Coupler Incompatibilities
  22. Convenient number (modified from a redirect page)
  23. System 32 (furniture) (enhanced after I translated it from the original German)
  24. Preferred metric sizes
  25. QSA and QRK code
  26. Operating signals
  27. ARRL Numbered Radiogram
  28. Time synchronization in North America
  29. NOTAM Code

Articles Translated

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Articles with Significant or Important Content Added

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Articles I think are Extremely Important Topics

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Wiki Formatting Testing

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Infobox template testing

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{{infobox DC-connector |
|name           = 4-Pin Molex connector
|image          = Molex female connector.jpg
|caption        = AMP Mate-n-Lok (a.k.a. Molex) connector (female).
|voltage        = Typically 5 V and 12 V; 200 V max
|amps           = 5–8.5 A typ.; 13 A max
|pins           = 4
|spec           = [http://catalog.tycoelectronics.com/TE/bin/TE.Connect?C=12881&F=0&M=CINF&GIID=1568&BML=10576,10782&PID=0&LG=1&I=13&RQS=C~12881^M~FEAT^BML~10576,10782^G~G Product Line Information]
|makers         = AMP
|usage          = Disk drive connector (most common)
}}

Categories

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