Notebook of Sand

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
"Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections"
  ACM Hypertext '09
"Archiving and Sharing Your Tinderbox"
  Tinderbox Weekend London '09
"The Electronic Nature of Future Literatures"
  Literary Studies Now, Apr '09
"The World University Project"
  St. John's Col. Cambridge, Feb '09
"Ethical Explanations,"
  The New Knowledge Forge, Jun '08
Lecture, Cambridge University
  Tragedy in E-Lit, Nov '07
Hypertext '07: Tragedy in E-Lit
Host for Tinderbox Cambridge '07
Keynote: Dickinson State Uni Conf
Upper Midwest NCHC'07: Speaker
eNarrative 6: Creative Nonfiction
HT'05: "Philadelphia Fullerine"
  Nelson award winning paper
NCHC '05:
 Nurturing Independent Scholarship
Riddick Practicum:
  Building Meeting Good Will
NCHC '04:
  Philadelphia Fullerine
  Lecture on American Studies
WWW@10: Nonfiction on the Web
NCHC '03: Parliamentary Procedure
ELL '03 -- Gawain Superstar
• (a)Musing (ad)Dictions:

Ideas. Tools. Art. Build --not buy. What works, what doesn't. Enjoy new media and software aesthetics at Tekka.

Theodore Gray (The Magic Black Box)

Faith, Life, Art, Academics. Sermons from my family away from home: Eden Chapel!

My other home: The Cambridge Union Society (in 2007, I designed our [Fresher's Guide])

The Economist daily news analysis

Global Higher Ed blog

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Fabulous game reviews at playthisthing.

• Stats

Chapter I: Born. Lived. Died.

There is a Chapter II.

Locale: Lancaster County Pa, USA

Lineage: Guatemala

Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

Interests: Anything I can learn. Training and experience in new media, computer science, anglophone literature, education, parliamentary debate, democratic procedure, sculpture, and trumpet performance. Next: applied & computational linguistics, probably.

Education: Private school K-3. Home educated 4-12. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elizabethtown College in Jan 2006. As the 2006 Davies-Jackson Scholar, I studied English at St. John's College, Cambridge University from 2006 - 2008.

Memberships: Eden Baptist, Cambridge Union Society, ACM, AIP, GPA.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

Why Try
Thursday, 20 Jun 2002 :-:

The Elizabethtown College Library is one of the most discouraging places I know. Yet I go there often to cheer myself up. As I sit and look out the windows on what will some day become my Alma Mater, I revel in accelerating despair and gleefully drink despondency's deep chalice. I go home singing.

Can you imaging anything as bad as being a statistic? I often marvel that I wasn't hit by lightning, didn't die from secondhand smoke, was not fatally squashed by a car, dissected by aliens from the tenth dimension, or dashed in the brains by some unseen assailant. The horse I passed on the way to work wasn't so lucky. I'll never figure out how I knew from a hundred-fifty yards away that the sagging lump on the side of the road was a body, but I couldn't doubt its deadness. The empty head (the brain was splashed all over the road, you see) sagged its mouth in a stupid grin at me. I called the township and told them. So had hundreds of others.

The little girl I passed on my way to work probably wanted to be a different kind of statistic than she was the day I passed by. I saw a glimpse of her blood-stained mother grasp her daughter close to her torn body as she screamed from pain. Tractor trailer trucks and their passengers statistically get hurt a lot less than the passengers of the economy car they crumple to pieces. I looked, I cried, I went to work, I put my shoulder to the corporate machine, and I went home a statistic.

Am I doomed to be an extra to this world's vast play? Am I fated to a numeric count? One of seventeen hundred students at Elizabethtown College. One of eighty honors students. The only dual English/ Comp Sci major who plays in the Wind Ensemble. One of millions who thinks he can write and wastes his time trying to gain the passing fancy of his fellow humans long enough to keep from starving. Or perhaps one of the thousands of fools who spend their life at their job, keeping other people's communications running by maintaining the computer and Internet systems. Another person making money so I can give it to people who make money to give it to other people who make money to give it to yet others. Or maybe even one of the rare few who likes his job of taking advantage of people who take advantage of those that take advantage of me.

Yay.