Take a flying leap:

[On Capitol Hill with Representatives Holt, Miller and Morella introducing a new Federal spam bill.]The Spam Wars.

I had been the Media Coordinator and occasional Legislative Liaison for The Forum for Responsible and Ethical E-mail, and more recently for The SpamCon Foundation, both groups of volunteers from all over the world and across the Internet dedicated to working with marketers, legislators and end-users to find solutions to the growing problem of unsolicited commercial bulk e-mail (or "spam"). In April of 2003, I became the Executive Director for SpamCon. Here are some examples of my efforts in that role:

  • Time Magazine 07.07.03 - Spam's Big Bang!, a very nice survey piece, examining all aspects of spam, including pending legislation: "Worse still, unsolicited email would effectively be protected by law, provided it had the fig leaf of an opt-out clause. 'This is a federal license to spam,' complains Andrew Barrett, director of the consumer group SpamCon."
  • Forbes Magazine 06.05.03 -The Grand Unified Theory of Spam, which discusses the recent efforts of the Anti-Spam Research Group: "Making radical changes to SMTP would be risky, Barrett says. But some solutions could be added fairly easily for whoever wants them."
  • A story for MSNBC that was picked up by Ziff-Davis (the publishers of PC Magazine) that begins with an investigation of a fraudulent spam promising impossibly cheap DVD players;
  • An update appearing in The Christian Science Monitor on the progress of proposed Federal Legislation that would give users and ISPs recourse against spammers in civil or small claims court;
  • A story in Direct Marketing News about a recent survey on attitudes about spam;
  • A PowerPoint slide show about the organization that I gave at an Internet security conference at MCI Worldcom headquarters in northern Virginia, and later at an e-mail marketing conference in San Francisco (MS PowerPoint, 457K).

 

II. Web Authoring and Site Maintenance

I've been doing site design and upkeep for private and nonprofit organizations since 1995. A screen shot of a prototype web interface for a new Internet-based electronic billing and payment product (MS PowerPoint, 497K) I designed once appeared in a front page article on the New York Times business section. It was later incorporated into the Smithsonian archive as a part of an innovation contest and award program that they sponsor each year. Here are some more recent examples:

  • deepcreekdays.com - feel free to peruse it, just bear in mind that it's a hobby site, and not a professional offering;
  • jung.org - for the nonprofit Washington Society for Jungian Psychology. It's been heavily modified by their new webmaster;
  • s4ms.com - for a former employer (Sensors for Medicine and Science, Inc.), largely unchanged since I first wrote it.

 

III. Desktop Publishing

I am adept at many of the more useful applications for publishing, notably MS Office (Word, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint, etc.), Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and the incorporation and manipulation of digital photographs and other graphics. Here are some recent examples:

  • I prepared this glossy flyer (Acrobat, 260K) for members of the Maryland General Assembly when I testified on behalf of a new Maryland law that would have placed reasonable controls on the use of e-mail for marketing;
  • I wrote and presented this slide show on e-mail encryption (MS PowerPoint, 443K) for the Scientific Advisory Board at a previous employer after I had implemented just such a system there for secure communications.