Personal Vision Statement

If I had to find a theme which ran through all of my work, I would say it is the application of pragmatic common sense. I'll illustrate how I apply it in projects, photography, and digital communication.

A project is an endeavor to create something tangible. As such, it exists in the present moment in the real world. However, the real world is an imperfect, changing place. Therefore, a project is never perfect. The quest for perfection is a journey; it is not a destination. And journeys are open ended affairs. I find that traveling the same path for a long time leads to stagnation. A project has a core set of things it wants to accomplish. As long as I have identified them and implemented them, I have successfully completed the project. I have learned something and come up with new ideas in the process. My next opportunity is the next project I undertake. Therefore my goal is to do many good projects instead of a very few perfect ones.

Photography is also a pragmatic endeavor. The photographic process is squeezing the visual dynamics of the physical world into the limited representational range of the photographic media. The art of photography is learning how to dispose of information, but still elicit an emotional response.

The science of photography is the optical theory from physics in combination with chemistry. The physics and chemistry have been mastered to the point where a recipe may be followed. At this stage, a craft is available for mass use. Over the past 100 years, much folklore has crept into the popular body of photographic knowledge. Folklore is simply the rules to follow without the underlying reason. My contributions to photography are to reexamine and relink folklore with the basics of physics and chemistry; and to demonstrate how a very basic understanding of science can make you a stronger, more versatile photographer.

Of course, the world has advanced over the past 100 years as well. There are now movies and sound as well as images, which form a conglomerate called multimedia, increasingly experienced on the World Wide Web, which I put under the umbrella of digital communication. Digital communication builds upon analog technology and adds its own set of technology. Presently, digital communication is constrained by limited bandwidth. Increasing the capacity is not a satisfactory solution to the problem. One aspect of the problem is the Internet does not guarantee any kind of connection. Plus, connections between popularly accessed sites may degrade as the number of simultaneous connections increase. A much better experience may be had by personalizing each user's experience. In this way, the chances are increased that the information transmitted will be relevant to the user. A companion idea is that the user interface be composed of more components rather than a monolithic block. This way, portions of the interface may be changed and the user has a quicker interactive experience. Translating the lush look of print requires more ingenious programming. My future efforts will be with Java to combine attractive aesthetics and quicker interactivity.

Basics: How to say my last name

Repeat after me

Basics: How to type my last name

My last name has an accent mark over the "e" . Here's how to type it on the various operating systems.

• Mac -- Hold the "Option" key and type "e" and then type "e" again.
• Windows -- First make sure "Num Lock" is on. Then hold the "Alt" key and hit "1" , "3" , and "0" on the numeric key pad.

  Alternatively, you could use the Character Map in the Accessories program group to select the characters.

• HTML -- If you have to suffer through hacking your own HTML code, the tag for my accent is "é"
  
• Unix flavors -- Low tech - "e'"
  
• OpenVMS -- Hold the "Compose" key and hit "e" and then hit "'"
  

Personality Type

According to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS), my personality is classified as an INTJ. The KTS follows the Myers-Briggs tests, but unlike the M-B test, you don't have to be a licensed professional to administer it.

Take the KTS test yourself. Read the Meyers-Briggs FAQ to find out even more. Follow this link if you are interested in the source code for the test.