So sometimes you take a few days off work. And you don’t take your laptop with you and you don’t check email at an Internet cafe or anything. And then when you come back you’re really kinda relaxed. And you don’t surf the daily sites. You delete all the posts in your news aggregator without reading them. And you learn to sleep in past 6:00am because (a) you only live two metro stops from work and don’t really need to get up that early and (b) the stuff in the news aggregator isn’t that compelling. So you don’t post anything for awhile. Maybe you’ll get back into that habit soon, maybe it’ll be a while.
And then you begin to write in the second person. At which point you think, “Man, there’s really something different going on in my noggin this week.”
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Not that anybody missed me that much. :-) After a roughly six-month hiatus I went out and purchased a domain, got a web host, and have re-launched this weblog. Why? Heck, I just kept seeing things I wanted to respond to and needed a place to do it.
Setting up Movable Type was a snap, but fiddling with the CSS templates until I got it just right took all afternoon. Sometimes perfectionism is it’s own punishment. :-/
Oh well. Sunday night. More to come during the week.
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Last updated: Oct 23, 2008
Me: Greg Ritter
Location: Washington, DC
Contact: greg@NOSPAMtenreasonswhy.com
(Remove the NOSPAM before you send. This keeps spammers from scraping my email address from this page)
Why “Ten Reasons Why:” Apparently, I tend to number my points when making arguments (probably stemming from high school debate team days). My colleagues noticed this rhetorical tic, and anytime I’d begin an explanation they’d jump in with “….and here’s ten reasons why!” Rather than let that stand, I have subverted their derogation and re-appropriated their good natured ribbing for the theme of this site. :-)
I’ve been weblogging off and on since the summer of 2000. This site is the second incarnation of Ten Reasons Why, and was begun in March 2003. The first Ten Reasons Why was hosted on a personal webpage through my then-ISP. There was also an even earlier weblog, Monkey-Mind. All of the Monkey-Mind and Ten Reasons Why v1.0 posts have been imported into this weblog.
Career: Currently Product Director at Blackboard Inc., a leading e-learning company.
In the past I have been (in roughly chronological order from age 16) an Arby’s cashier, a summer camp counselor, a stock attendant (aka truck unloader) at a now-defunct department store chain, a Domino’s pizza delivery guy, a library assistant, a freelance photographer, a student newspaper reporter, a bartender, a student newspaper editor, a camera salesman, a human guinea pig for various ergonomics engineering studies, a dishwasher and cook at an Italian restaurant, an English department teaching assistant at the University of Iowa, a waiter, the only non-vegetarian cashier for a natural foods store, a freelance PR writer, personal assistant to a minor real estate tycoon and restauranteur, co-founder and associate editor of a now-defunct monthly humor magazine, a data entry drone for an auto financing company, a technical editor for the Federal Reserve, copywriter for travel catalog CD-ROMs, English department faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, English department faculty at the University of Richmond, an only-marginally-successful playwright and short story author, project leader for an Annenberg Foundation grant on integrating technology into the writing classroom, instructional technology specialist at Gallaudet University (the university for the Deaf and hard of hearing), Acting Director of Learning Technologies at Gallaudet University, Instructional Designer/Trainer at Blackboard, Managing Consultant of Blackboard Learning Solutions, Business Development Manager at Blackboard, and Senior Product Manager for R&D at Blackboard.
I’ve been at Blackboard for nearly 10 years now. Since the longest I ever stayed at one job previously had been just under three years, I guess this counts as a career.
The Usual Disclaimer: This is my personal weblog and does not reflect the opinions or positions of my current employer, nor any of the other past employers listed above. Especially Arby’s.
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More fiddling later. It’s spring and the cherry blossoms on the National Mall are in bloom. I’m off to wander around outside among the flowers with my girlfriend. :-)
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