Shannon's Home Page

So what? Who is he and what does he do? Dang good questions, and I wish I had better answers. I'm a bit work-centered, getting a lot of satisfaction and even pleasure out of my work as a technical editor. Recently I've been a staff member at a couple of ISPs, and that link has kind of mutated into a work history kind of page. On the side I was doing various kinds of teaching--mostly computer stuff and even a bit of English.

So when is he? Maybe I can do better with this... These days I'm just a working stiff in Yamato City (near Tokyo) from M-F. Saturdays I usually socialize in Tokyo, and Sundays are for crucial stuff like laundry.

The Obligatory Short Autobiography and Link Madness

I've been here in Japan for since 1989, mostly teaching computer classes at the Kanda Institute of Foreign Languages (KIFL). Less memorable were a year at Yamanashi University (as a research student [Did you know there was a life form lower than graduate student?] in the Electronic Information Engineering Department) in Koufu after leaving KIFL and 'doing time' teaching English conversation for a few months when I first moved to Tokyo.

Back in the States, I was a contract programmer and consultant for some years after graduating from the computer science department of an enormous but supposedly well regarded state university. Actually, I learned much more while getting my first degree at Rice University, though my completed major subjects there were "nothing useful": philosophy, history, and sociology.

In my other wanderings, I even found my Golden Senior High School is on the net, though my earlier schools are lagging behind some of the other junior high schools and elementary schools in the county. I feel like I should also put a plug in for the Frontiers of Science Institute where I spent one of my most memorable high school summers acquiring various permanent scars. Jumping from the oldest to the newest, some of my most recent schooling was in a TESOL program at Temple University Japan, which was very thought provoking and even useful, though I didn't follow it that far at that time. I confess that I'm just not that interested in teaching English, even though I'm pretty good at it in my copious spare time. As a computer teacher, I'm usually much better than pretty good.

These days it seems like everyone has to be on the Web, so here are some friends, acquaintances, and fellow travelers from my various life stages, along with some typically peculiar and egocentric commentary. The Web equivalent of high school yearbooks? Not sure, but I wonder how many levels of connected links until everyone is included? My students also deserve an honorable place (with a few exceptions ;-) ).

I've had quite a number of strange hobbies over the years, but the ongoing ones these days are running, studying Japanese, and of course fiddling with computers. I've also done quite a bit of reading from many authors over the years. There's even a searchable version of my book database using a little Perl script.