Michael Brown

A TechnicalWriter (and really, anything else that didn't involve coding is something I've done somehow: user interface design, testing, admin work, etc.) since 1988 in the ResearchTrianglePark area of North Carolina. Done time (in this order) at Burroughs Wellcome, Northern Telecom (pre-Nortel), Glaxo, Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation, DukeUniversity (briefly), Glaxo Wellcome, Glaxo Smith Kline, NCSU's Bioinformatics Research Center, and now a technical writing company in the Park. Various interests include reading, bread-baking, drawing, comics, and whatever other shiny object attracts my magpie attention.

Stumbled across this wiki whilst searching Google on IndexCards, and have spent the past several weeks plundering it for lunchtime reading material. Have since downloaded EddiesWiki to my home PC so I can play with a PersonalWiki.

Update: Now playing with TiddlyWiki, which is great fun and more portable. I also use NoteStudio on my Palm and PC, which is quite serviceable, though I find I don't use it as much as before. I think I'm trying to wean myself off of information hoarding.

Am pondering creating a page on Michel de Montaigne, a 16th century writer whose name I've not seen on this wiki. He is generally credited with creating the personal essay form in his book Assais ("attempts"), in which he regurgitated quotes from his reading and then attempted to pin to the page what he thought in all its messy honesty. As he re-issued his essays in new editions, he would never delete what he had written. Instead, he would add a phrase or a sentence or some other qualifier to welcome that older text into his current ways of thought. Hence, when you see an edition of his essays (the Frame translation is most respected whilst the Skreech is considered more colloquial and less arch) you'll see superscripted A's, B's, or C's here and there throughout the lines. A signifies the first version, B a later addition, and C an even later addition.

This wiki's edits and additions and conversations around a single topic reminded me of Montaigne's ABC annotations to his own essays as he argued and talked to himself. Montaigne wrote that the reason he began his essays were because he had lost his best friend to whom he could talk of anything.

email: em ee underscore brown at yahoo dot com

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