Paul I will like to know you more as in where are you from and the kind of work you do?
I grew up in Kenmore, NY. (MAP TO: 309 TREMONT AVENUE)
It is Buffalo first suburb right at the North edge of the city. I attended Roosevelt, Kenmore Middle, and Kenmore West. As a young adult, my favorite hobbies were hiking and raving. By the time I was 18, I was ready to leave Buffalo the first chance I got. I actually hated it here and thought I would never come back. Not because I didn't love my friends or family but because I thought there was no hope for getting a cool job and I really wanted to see other warmer places.
I immediately attended Winthrop College
in South Carolina for a year at Winthrop and studied zoology. I went there because we were visiting South Carolina when I was applying for school and I though, oh it is warm here.I thought I was going to be a tortoise doctor but I couldn't deal with dissecting any more animals and ended up becomming vegan. Three fetal pig dissections and I had had it. I started studying German Language and got a scholarship to go to Flenburg, Germany for a year. It is a small town in Schleswig Holstein. I loved living there and had the best time learning German.
When it was time to come home, Winthrop had dropped there German program and I had to find a new shcool. They hadn't told me until I got there, so my parents and I had driven from Buffalo to South Carolina and then had to come back. It was too late for me to go to school in Buffalo, so I took a year off and worked as a temp at various horrible jobs including a day as a tech guy at a fatcory where they burned formaldyhyde to make other chemicals. You got to love Niagara Falls. I continued studying German on my own and applied for school at Northern Arizona Univeristy where a friend of mine from Winthrop was going to school. Amy Adams, I wonder where she is now?
While there I got really into computers and programming while working as a lab assistant in the Language Learning Center under the direction of Bernd Conrad
It was a great combination of learning German and learning about computers. I mean I had had a lifetime of computer exposure and programmed my Commodore 64 as a kid, but it was my first attempt as an adult. I became obssessed with programming and computer graphics.Soon I met (e:terry) at NAU. I was determined to go back to Germany, so he and I packed up and left for Germany in 2000 and stayed in Jena, Germany at the Frederick Schiller University. I took a class on language software development and really thought that was going to be in my future.
When I graduated and we got home to buffalo I had no money. I saw a job in the paper for a Multimedia Assistant at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. I ended up landing the job and it pretty much ruined me financially, working for about $16,000/year at a school where the student paid more than $20,000/year for school. I would teach a class for about $2,700.
I also became an Adjunct Professor of 3D modeling and web programming.
Somewhere in here (e:twisted) came into my life.
My boss at Canisius told me to get my MFA so that I could apply to be a full-time staff member. I started working on my MFA in 2003 at the University of BUffalo. There I studied Virtual Reality at first. I was really excited with it because it combined 3D modeling with web and networking. Unfortunately, it seemed to generally inaccessible to the public to make it very interesting for long. I initially had envisioned it as a great tool for language learning as it would allow a sort of tele-immersion.
In 2001, I met (e:matthew) and he and (e:terry) and I became a triple and still are today.
I quickly switched to my focus to web programming and found it was my favorite thing in the world. In 2003, I founded elmwoodstrip.com as my thesis project. It continued to grow a lot and at the same time allowed me a stage to test all kinds of new code out with a large audience. It also broaded my social horizons considerably by allowing me to create my own tool for social networking.
It also started me documenting just about all of my life. At this point I have written over 2000 journals and uploaded over 300 media files. If you really want to know everything that happend in between, you can read my journal. I docuemnt just about everything I do that is of any interest and even things that aren't ;) I became especially addicted to the web when I combined it with my multitude of cell phones - the latest one, a sprint PPC 6700, records mobile video and has huge bandwidth e.g. (e:paul,4434)
When it came time for Canisius to hire a full time professor I still wasn't finished with my MFA. I didn't get the job which I think was for the better looking back on it. When I foung out they hired some guy who didn't even have an MFA, I was really quite devastated.
Then one of my favorite students brought in an article in a classified ad for a position at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. The job sounded like a perfect match. I applied and never expected anything to come out of it because although I am an excellent programmer with lots of experience, I had no computer science degree.
I brought in lots of code samples and talked to them about my previous work. It worked because I got the job. I love my job so much. Working at Roswell has been amazing. The project vary all the time. Th elast thing I designed was a web based image manipulation and annotation program for the dermatology department. It was a replacement for the polaroid/manilla folder system they used to use.
Now I am working on an online employee evaluation system and the have taken over development of the intranet. One of the biggest focuses of my recent work has been an extensive clientside javascript library that will be used by the other team members in order to standardize our javascript and add many convenient widgets to our UIs.
The job pays me enough that I could buy a mansion (e:paul,4343) , well at least, in Buffalo. So I think I will probably end up being here forever, unless someone offers me more than 100,000 a year and moves me.
In 2006, artvoice
began hosting our server, which has made it possible to greatly expand the previous constraints on the size and bandwidth of the site. I would like to expand the mobile usage of the site. There is a an xhtml mini mirror for easy access on web capable cell phones. The problem is that Buffalo, NY is only slowly moving towards the mobile web. This month I added mobile video to the journals. I hope that part of the site grows exponentially in the near future.This is my portoflio but kind of outdated a bit
So hopefully that answers your questions.
About the Ghosts
In response to (e:shawn):273 I dreamed about ghosts all night long. In my dream the radio tower fell on our house and it disturbed the ghosts. Ironically, they lived in the closet and were black and white. In the dream (e:terry) refused to stop playign warcraft to come see them and (e:matthew) wouldn't believ me. Tehy gave me the choice of going into the closet and becomming one of them or them coming out, but then we would have to house them. I had them come out, they turned color and suddenly we went from a threesome to a ssixsome. It was one of the longest dreams I had in my life I think. I rememeber trying to tell my mother, who knows I am an athiest, that I now believe in ghosts and that they are coming over for dinner and she will have to cool for them, lol.
Wow, I'm a historical footnote. I guess that's better than being a hysterical one, haha.
thanks for sharing a bit of Pauls story ;)
The idea of ghosts kinda freaks me out. I was thinking of finding an over night haunted house excursion-- perhaps we have one already, once the three of you move to your new place? yikes.
Thanks for all that detail Paul. I knew you lived here and went to Germany but didn't know all the details.
On a side note you can belive in Ghosts and in Angles also and still not belive in god. Just because there isn't a god dosn't mean we don't have a soul. There is a claim that if there is enough Electircty in the air and there is a verry violant murder that the death can be recorded in the air and that it can play at certain times. Not sure if I belive that has ever happened but it is a theory. If the thing that seperates living things and things that are dead is soul or some kind of energy then there is no reason that once someone dies that the enegry is realesad and sometimes can be seen.
paul i saw your hottie-hot-hot cousin out last night... I was going to tell him that I met you and Mike, but in the end I didn't b/c (e:strip) would come up and he's from work and I'd rather not have work people finding my journal these days...
you're so fucking cool Paul!