Recent blog entries for mjbrown

I was recently asked to update my unbelievably terse and ineffective resume in order to help a consulting firm command a good billing rate for a project they have me in mind for. As I started working on it, I also happened to be poking around in the XML 1.0 spec for something or other, and noticed that one of the errata that had been folded into the Second Edition looked strangely familiar. I clicked on a link and found that the erratum in question was based on an issue I had raised on a W3C mailing list a long, long time ago. They had taken action on it and followed my suggestion, and I had no idea until just now.

Curious, and thinking (mostly in jest) that this event qualifies me to say that I am a "co-author" of the XML 1.0 Recommendation, I did some more digging. To my surprise, I found that quite a few nitpicky emails I've fired off to various committees over the last few years have resulted in constructive actions. In fact, it's an impressive and sizable list, even if you take out the handful of submissions that are just typo or grammar corrections. I can't believe I didn't think to do this sooner. My "consulting" resume now makes me really stand out.

However, having been out of paying work for over a year now, and being rather cynical about my prospects, I still generally regard my resume as a useless waste of bits... hence the inclusion, in this new version, of a full-color ASCII art rendering of my head.

I'm thinking about maybe just becoming a truck driver. Seriously.

I guess I'm not really very inclined to write about software projects in a diary. If I do get the urge, I usually post to a more constructive and immediately gratifying forum, like a mailing list devoted to the topic in question. xsl-list, 4suite-dev and xml-dev are where I post the most.

If you're interested in seeing a more general what-semi-interesting-crap-is-my-mind-today kind of weblog, go read the public entries in my LiveJournal.

I was looking for someone and ended up finding their diary here through a Google search. This site looked interesting, so here I am with a new account.

I still haven't managed to find a working email address for the guy I was looking for (bneely). He has an account on a site I co-admin (hyperreal) and I needed to give him some updated info. I'm sure whoever is reading this is very interested.

Well let's see. I'm working on redoing my personal home page after a catastrophic hardware failure. This time around, I'm making a list of accomplishments (at least, ones that I can link to), including my modest contributions to free software like lynx.

My latest code-related projects have been in the realm of educating people about XML, XPath, XSLT, Unicode, and related languages and protocols.

Yay.