{"id":11,"date":"2017-03-20T14:34:43","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T18:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/?page_id=11"},"modified":"2019-12-17T20:55:30","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T00:55:30","slug":"about-me","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/about-me\/","title":{"rendered":"About Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

About Me<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

I grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and have always lived in one or another city in the general area. I received a philosophy degree from Trent University<\/a>, in Peterbourough. My fields of interest within that discipline involved studies in perception, social and cultural interaction, and pedagogical methodologies. My major influences were drawn from Eastern and non-classical bodies of thought, as well as from concepts found within the science fiction and fantasy genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside of those studies, I pursued a long-time fascination with computers, along with creative writing and film production. Also during that time, I was one of the founding Schools and Universities co-chairs of the Toronto Free-Net<\/a>, had some additional involvement with SchoolNet<\/a>, and was an active volunteer who helped develop and QA Mozilla’s SeaMonkey web browser. (If you navigate to https:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/credits\/<\/a> you will see my name listed.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first full-time job was as Systems Integrator at Nicholls-Radtke<\/a> (now Aecon), a construction company in Cambridge. While there I devoted my time to maintaining and improving their computer systems. Later, I accepted a job offer at ZENON Environmental<\/a> (now GE) in Burlington which led to a position as Systems Manager. After that, I worked as Systems Engineer with MicroAge<\/a> in Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I switched from IT to technical support when I was hired by Volt<\/a> to work as a support engineer at Microsoft Canada<\/a> in Toronto. But the final, and most formative, twelve years of my computer career came when I was employed by VMware<\/a> here in Burlington. At the time, VMware was still a startup company with about 600 employees. Today, it is a multi-billion dollar company with over 20,000 employees worldwide, whose parent company, EMC, was recently bought by Dell for over $60 billion, the largest acquisition of a software company in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all of my experience and expertise, however, neither IT nor support was something I was really passionate about as a career. At the start of my last year at VMware, I transitioned from being a senior support engineer to being a technical editor of the company’s technical marketing division. Over the years at VMware, I had been involved with aspects of training, technical documentation, and the development of the company’s knowledge base system\u2014so becoming a technical editor was something for which I was well qualified. It allowed me to combine all of my interests in the English language, writing, editing, and critical analysis. It was also beneficial that I was editing material for software applications that I had previously supported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have taken several formal editing courses in Ryerson University’s publishing certificate program<\/a>, worked as a freelance editor since leaving VMware, and am now working as a technical content developer at Dell<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In additional to technical material, I have worked with scholastic papers, short stories, film scripts, and websites. I also have experience as the editor in chief of a newsletter produced by a condominium for its owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a more personal note, I am a connoisseur of craft beer, fine wine and scotch, gourmet cheese and game meat, and food of any culture. I like to travel, and I will always take time for a good game of pool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About Me I grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and have always lived in one or another city in the general area. I received a philosophy …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","archive-loop-container"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}