Sample portfolio
A lot of my technical work has been done under NDA for various reasons which presents a challenge for potential clients trying to figure out if I'm the Right Guy for The Job. While it's possible to read this website and get a feel for my writing style, it's certainly not an ideal solution.
To this end, I present to you a handful of full-length pieces written at various points, and are primarily educational or journalistic in nature, as well as some shorter, single-page pieces.
(The content in the following PDFs is mostly owned by people other than myself; please do not reproduce or redistribute it.)
Full-length samples
- The best anti-spam solutions for Windows (PDF)
- 4700 words
- Published August 2003 by Ars Technica, a Condé Nast company
- During 2003, spam filtering for email clients wasn't as mature as it was today. It was uncommon for ISPs to provide any sort of effective junk mail filtration. Users resorted to doing crazy stuff like running their own email proxies and buying third party add-ons to stem the digital detritus. This article examined the solutions that were the State of the Art at the time. (This was just barely after Bayesian spam filtering had been made useful.)
- CD Ripping and encoding guide (PDF)
- 6700 words
- Written July 2003 and published by Ars Technica, a Condé Nast company
- Written back when people actually bought music CDs, and having an iPod was a novelty. De-mystified everything from Ogg to Musepack (MPC) to mp3 to AAC. Covered Windows and Linux, the various tagging standards, and the results of double-blind listening tests.
- Becoming a Nurse: Options and Pathways for All Walks of Life (PDF)
- 8700 words
- Published May 2010
- Covers the various pathways to nurse licensure. Written for 3 categories of student: high school grads, recent college grads with non-nursing degrees, and career changers. Examines Associate's degrees, Bachelor's degrees, direct-entry Master's programs, diploma programs, student debt, opportunity costs, and Advanced Practice Nursing programs and limitations.
Shorter pieces
- Plasma thruster for a Mars mission? – January 2006
- Malaria's cloaking device(s) – January 2006
- How a high-fat diet causes Type II diabetes – January 2006
- Tylenol is the leading cause of liver failure – January 2006
- Disrupting HIV infection using zinc fingers – December 2005
- Neutron stars instead of black holes – November 2005
- Fiber-DSL wars in Italy heat up – November 2003
- As the music industry turns – October 2003
- Gateway steps on IBM's and Sun's toes – December 2002
- Multimedia celebrates its fiftieth birthday… with CSIRAC – December 2002