goer.org

About

"About" is pretty vague. Does it mean "about the person" or "about the website"? In this case, it's both. Let's give this a shot.

Contact

To contact me, send email to my first name (Evan) at my last name (Goer) dot org. It's as easy as pie. Mmm, pie.

Bio

As it says on the front page, my name is Evan Goer, and I'm a thirty-three-year-old technical writer working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My family moved to the Bay Area in 1977, so technically, I'm not a native. But by California standards, moving here when you're less than three years old is basically the moral equivalent of being a flinty-eyed ninth generation New Hampshire farmer.^[1]. My theory is that if you've lived here over ten years, you are transformed into a Real Californian and have earned the right to start looking down on all those newcomers. From that point on, the only person who is allowed to look down on you is Joan Didion.

I attended public elementary school, middle school, and high school in and around my hometown of Sunnyvale, CA, plus a few years of Sundays attending Hebrew school at a well-to-do local synagogue. These experiences made it crystal clear to me that your ability to become successful as a human being has nothing to do with whether your parents sent you to public or private school. Also, I learned to touch type.

After that, college at Harvey Mudd, followed by a year of graduate school at UCSB. It turns out that there's a big difference between "being pretty good at physics homework and tests" and "being a successful working physicist." I mean think about it: to be a Ph.D condensed-matter experimentalist at a university you have to have a reasonably solid understanding of the following areas:

• quantum mechanics
• statistical mechanics
• mathematics
• analog electronics
• digital electronics
• vacuum systems
• semiconductor processing
• optics
• plumbing
• carpentry
• metalwork and machining
• accounting
• grant writing
• software development
• UNIX systems administration
• statistical methods
• pedagogy
• Parseltongue
• Lie algebras

Kidding about that last one, of course. Anyway, I discovered that while I can learn one, two, or possibly even three things at the same time, fifteen or twenty makes my brain freeze up. So off into the world I went!

Or rather, back into the safe world of the Bay Area, I went. Fortunately, at that time they were hiring any doofus who could manage to drag himself to a career fair and drop a resume on a table.^[2] Even more fortunately, my new boss brought me into a fantastic group of writers who took me under their wing, even though I was a lowly contractor.^[3]

I've been working as a technical writer ever since. Technical writing is an interesting career choice in that it's so evenly balanced between the technology, the writing, and the social. You have to be technical enough to understand what the engineers are talking about and speak their language. You have to write well enough to communicate their work to the larger audience. And fundamentally, you have to like and respect engineers, and they have to like and respect you. It's this polymath aspect that really appeals to me about the field. Also there's the fact that as a technical writer, you will never, ever carry a pager. Ever heard of a "tech pubs emergency"? Neither have I.^[4][5]

1. In New Hampshire, obviously.

2. I had vaguely heard of this "technical writing" thing -- it was technical, and I was technical. And it involved writing, and I liked writing! So there you go.

3. Who couldn't tell you what the passive voice was to save his life.

4. Which is not strictly true. There was that one time I got flown off on very short notice to Amsterdam, but that was unusual to say the least.

5. Are you an engineer? Are you looking for work-life balance? Look no farther than technical writing, my friend.

Website

This website is powered by Movable Type 3.33. I've been using MT for many years. Before that, the site and the journal was completely hand-coded. Eventually I figured out that computers are really good at copy and maintaining archives, and humans are really bad. Kind of like my epiphany about doing taxes by hand. Yes, you can do taxes by hand, with itemized deductions, even. But boy, it's a pain. If only someone would invent some kind of amazing machine that was really really good at arithmetic and looking stuff up in tables!

This site uses HTML 4.01 Strict. A while back I was very interested in the technical differences between HTML 4 and XHTML 1. These days, I consider the issue long settled. That said, things could always get interesting again...

For layout, I use the outstanding YUI CSS libraries made available by my colleagues down the hall at Yahoo!. At this point, anyone who doesn't at least use Fonts and Reset is stark raving mad.

As for why I started up the Journal, I have to give most of the credit to my blogmother, Marissa Lingen. Without her, there would be a website of sorts, but there would be no X-Philes, no Bad Movie Classification System, no HTML House of Horror, no Magazines for the West Coast Elitist, and worst of all, no pie.

Copyright

If you look over to the right sidebar, you'll see a Copyright section that says:

Text released under Creative Commons.

To use this license, you must attribute this work properly. This license does not extend to comments unless the original poster of that comment states otherwise.

This means that every page where that little stamp appears is under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. In other words, that you can freely copy and produce derivative works from these pages, as long as you give me proper attribution. At a minimum, proper attribution means that you should link back to my site and mention my full name, "Evan Goer". If you are reposting or remixing my text, I would love to receive an email from you about what you're doing. But technically, you don't have to inform me, let alone ask for permission -- that's the beauty of Creative Commons.

Some caveats: if you stumble across a page that does not have the Creative Commons image, then full copyright applies. Also, the Creative Commons license doesn't apply to blog comments. Other than that, go nuts!

Comments

I love getting comments. Reading comments is really most of what makes keeping this website fun. Even if you post on a very old entry, I will receive an email notification. Note that I've had some old entries I've had to close, because the spammers found them and kept banging away. But most entries in the archive are wide open.

As for an official Comment Policy... gosh, that all sounds like a lot of work. Some people have elaborate systems involving warnings, or a moderation system, or flagging of offending passages with a link back to the policy, or disemvoweling. As for this site, well...

This site gets hammered all day with spam, most of which is incredibly offensive and stupid. Fortunately, automated methods deflect the vast majority of the spam, leaving only a tiny fraction that I have to delete by hand. But when I do have to nuke an individual piece of spam, my finger hovers over the button for an interminable moment. As I think about the poor spammer, and all that wonderful free speech of his that I'm trampling, a little tear trickles down the corner of my eye. Truly.

Thus endeth the Comment Policy.