I've been at HighWire since April of 1998. After my son was born I didn't think I could keep sysadminning, which I had been doing as a contractor for a company which had treated me really poorly and was starting to mostly have work for either salespeople or very junior people, but not so much for anyone with more than 6 months of experience. Anyway, I figured the lad was enough 3AM wakeup calls to make system administration a bad idea for a while. Chad started at HighWire when Edward was about 3 weeks old, and I was extremely impressed with everything I saw and heard, and couldn't help thinking, "Geeze, I want to work there." So, I asked Sandy if there might be any work at HighWire that I could do from home, and after talking about it, we agreed I'd try my hand at being a developer, writing SGML parsers in perl, and come to work for HighWire Press.

SGML parsing is meticulous work. It took a lot of effort to learn to do it, but it's also highly interesting. I think it takes practice, and that I'll probably never run out of room for improvement in terms of how I handle the problems I solve. I love my job. It keeps me on my toes and busy but it fits in with the rest of my life seamlessly. I'm also never bored, and I'm working on stuff that's really worthwhile, with skilled and intelligent co-workers who are all dedicated and hard-working.

Sometimes in the past year it has seemed odd to me that I'm not a sysadmin, since I was one for so long, and since being a sysadmin is, by its nature, something of a way of life. But I'm getting used to it. I still think I'm probably a better sysadmin than developer, but I'm getting there.

What I do is take content that we receive, for journals, and write tools that are used to convert it from SGML into our own internal markup. From there it's worked over once again and the result is something that works with HighWire's remarkable server system to bring online the top-notch journals with which we work.

In February of 1998 my main squeeze and I were thrilled by the birth of our son, Edward Paul Tudor.

• ObCuteKid

These are the potentially useful links.

• Perl at reference.perl.com
• Some useful perl, SGML, and HTML docs
• The perl tutorial I liked best
• I use vim for my text editor. And not that you asked, or anything, but I've put the config files and suchlike that I cannibalized from other people here for anyone else to grab if they so desire. It works with colors and syntax highlighting and all that kinda good stuff.
• Microimages' free X server for the Mac. It works quite nicely, I downloaded it and was running it on my 68k powerbook in under 5 minutes. So I have to note that it distinctly does not suck.
• Free Development Systems for the Mac FAQ So after I had a functional X server I thought I'd look for a C compiler so I could ponder porting the window manager of my choice and running it locally instead of screwing around with running it from a remote UNIX host.

In February of this year my main squeeze and I were thrilled by the birth of our son, Edward Paul Tudor.

• ObCuteKid

• Isambard Brunel A very interesting fellow
• Find A Grave. No really, this one is interesting.
• The Catalan Atlas While I was pregnant I did this massive jigsaw puzzle that was a print of this, roughly the size of a door.
• Folk Music I have quite a repertoire and know of more songs than I can sing, and I only know of maybe one song in 50 that are archived here.