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.

Welcome, WITF Listeners
Saturday, 13 Aug 2005 :-:

My blog was mentioned on the American Public Media radio show Weekend America today. It featured discussion from the members of the Harrisburg Bloggers Meetup group (I have mentioned the group previously on this blog ).

Photos from the interview with Stu Kennedy can be found on my Flickr account.

Other bloggers in our group include:

If you want to get a feel for what blogs can be, these provide a good introduction. But I would suggest a few more blogs:

For more information about blogs, check out:

  • If you want to start a blog, start by reading Mark Bernstein's marvelous "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web." This was the article that convinced me to start my own blog.
  • Bloggers like to rehash the same conversation on "what is a blog anyway?" over and over, with very little agreement and many self-proclaimed experts. Get the encyclopedia definition of a blog, written by Jill Walker, who co-write the very first scholarly analysis of blogs with Torill Mortensen, whose blog I also like (posts like this are why).
  • If you're interested in Electronic Literature, check out Grand Text Auto, a collection of posts from researchers electronic literature. The current discussion? An interactive play called Facade.
  • If you want to start your own blog, you might want to get a free blog via LiveJournal or Blogger. If you need to host photos, try a Flickr account. I use an information tool called Tinderbox, which doesn't just handle my blog. I use it for nearly all my writing, information gathering, TODO lists, and brainstorming. The weblog quick-start tool will set up a blog for you. Editing and formatting a blog is much easier in Tinderbox than in the plaintext tools in Blogger and liveJournal. Even better, you don't need a blog-specific web host to publish your site. I reviewed Tinderbox for Sitepoint a year-and-a-half ago. For now, it's Mac OS X only, but a Windows version is coming soon. If you need a blog on Windows or don't want to pay for an information swiss-army-knife, I would suggest the free, Open Source tool Thingamablog. With Thingamablog, you can be blogging in minutes.

Happy Blogging!

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Of course, if you're interested in my site, I would suggest that you read some of the archives, found at the top of this page, or look at some of the other parts of the site: