Notebook of Sand

Leaves in the Desert - Contents

Contact: jnm@rubberpaw.com

Curriculum Vitae

Studies: Cambridge University

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
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.

Confessed Tinderbox users share ideas at the Tinderbox Wiki.

Listen and learn. WITF's Dr. Dick's insightful, informative music blog.

Smiling Cultural Studies: James Lileks

Artistic computing: Paul Graham

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])

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

President of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Hypertext, blogging, and game theory: Jill Walker.

• 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.

Skills: Everything I can learn. Primary focus: Writing. Trumpet (since age 8), Parliamentary Procedure, classical guitar (since age 20), juggling, stage/coin magic, road cycling, hypertext, computer programming, electronic document processing, system administration, GNU/Linux, photography, graphics design, historical research, balsa aircraft building. Public speaking etc.

Interests: I am a polymath, therefore: anything I can learn. Current primary focus: writing, and thus everything else. Recycling, road cycling, nonfiction reading, classic movies, hypertext, computers, Software Freedom, language, art, photography, cartography, biography, ecology, science, psychology, law, government, politics (but not mindless insanity), philosophy, history, pedagogy, music, culture, sculpture. If it's learnable, I'm so there.

When possible, I like to integrate these things.

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 go up to St. John's College, Cambridge University to read English in Oct 2006.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

The Universal Mud Puddle
Sunday, 9 Mar 2003 :-:

This universe consists of a mud puddle and a void. In the puddle, tenants carefully pore over each mud-molecule, sucking them, testing to find one that tastes good. Another group has disavowed this first group, and leaving their midst, is incessantly, unswervingly intent on creating new particles of mud from old ones.

Once, a man somehow found himself on the edge of the puddle, perched on the edge of the unknown void. Dissatisfied with the taste of all the ugly specks and uncertain of the quality of recycled ones, which seemed so quickly to end up back in the first pile, he pondered the possibilities of Void.

"It's dangerous out there!" said a friend as he looked on.

"You've been there?" he replied.

"Of course not! It's dangerous," retorted the onlooker.

"Oh." The man swung his legs over Void and felt the fresh breezes against his bare feet. He jumped off the edge of the world and began to fall.

As he fell, he heard voices above, "Idiot! No one has ever returned!" from one side, and "You're still just one of us!" from the other.

To his surprise, he landed lightly on solid ground. For the first time in his life, he felt grass between his toes. He started walking, kept walking, until the mud puddles were lost, themselves specks in the vast expanse of Void.

He never returned.