This is the Thomas Vander Wal that went to Lincoln High; Saint Mary's College of California; Centre for Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford, England; and grad school at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute.
Current Life:
Work...
Web Support Manager, Senior Internet Technologest
INDUS Corporation
Side Projects...
AIfIA, Leadership Council
Boxes and Arrows, Alumni Tech Lead
Live...
Bethesda, Maryland with my wonderful wife Joy.
Past Lives:
Work...
PSS, Inc. - Director Information Application Services & Director Product Development; InterImage, Inc. - Senior Business Analyst & Tech Lead; CompassRose International - Director of Strategic Analysis; AILA - Information Specialist; AMCRA - Research Associate; U.S. Senate - Fellow; Fritz Companies, Inc. - Account Rep. & Data Analyst; and Commonwealth Club of California - Membership Development.
Lived...
Arlington, VA; San Francisco, CA; Oxford, England, UK; Moraga, CA; Stockton, CA; Pacific Palisades, CA; Portland, OR; Bellevue, WA; Spokane, WA.
Getting Here
I am fortunate that work and play intersect to a great degree. I build information applications based on Internet technologies and base a lot of my work on information architecture foundations.
In college I chose communication as my major (over economics, the draw to this subject stems from a great econ teacher in high school) as I did not have a great grasp of how people interacted and shared information easily nor efficiently. What made a good speech that hit home? What made an advertisement stick in your head? These sort of questions triggered a tidal wave of interest. The digital information trends in the office and home really added to the interest.
The Site
Much of this site is built with TextPad (PC), BBEdit (Mac), and a touch of Dreamweaver MX and put into place with FTP. The graphic elements are created and modified with Adobe PhotoShop and Macromedia FreeHand. The site is moving toward validating XHTML and CSS.
The "Off the Top" section, is managed with a content management system built from scratch using PHP and MySQL. This is a light weight system that I built to ease content creation and upkeep. This tool has a browser-based administrative front end that eases entry posting from nearly anywhere as well as ease metadata classification. There is currently more than 140 keywords for cross classification, which help find related information.
Vanderwal.net is now hosted at PHP Web Hosting, which supports applications and sites developed with PHP, Perl, Python and MySQL. PHP Web Hosting has been a great host with low cost and great uptime and service. I have had three wonderful years with them.
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