 |
I’m a talented graduate from the California university system with a degree in Environmental Engineer and concentrations (minors) in computer science, business sales and hospitality. Although the subject mater of my study didn’t contribute to new power plant construction or developing processes for today’s Green revolution, the roots of engineering principles, my technical acumen and confidence have left me with a breadth of skills, passions and interests I want to share to those that will listen (or in this case read).
Web: In 1996 I interned as a researcher for the US government and was tasked with analyzing and presenting our findings via private intranets. During that time, I taught myself windows (I was primarily a Power Mac user), Solaris (all our modeling was run on this) and HTML. In my free time, my first personal site was created on Geocities (R.I.P.). In 2001, I purchased AustinVegas.com and have my 5.0 version of this site running today (2010). I’m intrigued and self instructed in web & digital design, web server maintenance (I have 2 domains), SEO, online advertising and social media services (my full networking list).
Name: For those that personally know me, they quickly realize that Austin Vegas is not my birth name. It’s chosen today to represent my online identity in all things not career, business or transactionally related to my online life. Austin Vegas is a nickname, bestowed originally to me for my success rate in Las Vegas (those were the days) and later it became my character as host and infrequent DJ for events I supervised. I’ve developed a slight misanthropic attitude of the online community with 9+ years of experience as an award-winning professional in the IT/Information Security business, and prefer to keep as much personal information private as possible. Moreover I prefer to hold as much control over finding me online as possible by creating this identity and keeping connections of my personal and work related worlds as separate as possible. It’s similar to using a fake name, number and address on your supermarket rewards card to avoid the spam, but you know Safeway/CVS is still able to create a buyer profile for whatever character name you create.
Publishing: I try to keep the content from all my life streams separate so the subscriber can choose how much or what content is interesting enough to ingest. AV.com is my personal Wordpress blog, originally used as my primary stream-of-conscience writing tool, it’s now evolved as a result of new technologies, as my primary publisher for original, well-crafted (mostly), personal and social commentary. The content of this blog is unbound by personal interests in international and domestic travel, personal social events, today’s technology & innovation (RSS Tech), my culinary exploits in restaurants or food (RSS Food), my disdain for political hypocrisy and malfeasance (RSS Politics), my love for all music and their creators, samplers or DJs, cultural arts, history, science, nature, Environmental activism, Photography (RSS Photo) and especially the humor, scandal, irony and education of life. Yes, that’s a lot to take on, but I really don’t post more than once a day and as I noted above, you can select to read (via RSS) only the subject categories that interest you, the reader, the most – follow the entire AV.com feed.
Because Wordpress is “lonely” and doesn’t have any social relationships, I created a Tumblr account which until reciently was just a glorified RSS feed for this blog. Following my Tumblr account though will cue the subscriber into a different and more concise stream of spontaneous thoughts, picture-only posts, music, videos, quick re-posting of other blogs, conversations and quotes.
I have a presence on most social websites, however, I only actively use Facebook and Linkedin. Depending on your personal or business relationship with me, you might have access respectively or to both.
I’ve been an amateur photographer for as long as I’ve owned a camera (winning my first and only award at the County Fair in High School) and use Flickr to publish more specific work (like my 365 Project) and have Smugmug set up more as my online repository for all my general use galleries.
The latest micro-blogging tool and re-post (retweet) service is Twitter which I seem to have more followers than any of my other services. I usually update this when ever I’m mobile or I’m reposting from my desktop TweetDeck application. Follow my twitter for an aggregation of my Tumblr and other quick thoughts.
Thank you for reading and enjoy! |
