I’m currently a support engineer by trade, with going on ten years experience supporting complex SaaS products. I love helping people solve difficult technical problems, and happily employ a variety of skills to do that, including direct ticket support, deep troubleshooting, writing and editing documentation, and contribution to the product codebase. I’ve worked mostly remote for the last few years and enjoy and prefer that.

I used to do active transportation things (advocacy/activism, outreach and encouragement programs) and enjoy outdoor activities like cycling and hiking, though a series of injuries made it hard to pursue those things and I’m still out of the habit. I used to do linguistics things — also techy — and that’s what my academic background is in, but since I moved into support it’s been more of a hobby.

I don’t tend to my public online presence as much as I did for a while, so while you can find past musings here and on Twitter, more info these days will be on GitHub or LinkedIn.

Active Transportation

Between 2009 and 2014 I volunteered with the BTA and PBOT’s Active Transportation group as an Ambassador, and was involved with Active Right of Way. In summer 2011 I worked at SMART in Wilsonville as a Program Assistant on the Discover Wilsonville SmartTrips-style individualized marketing program. I’ve written for Portland Afoot and the WPC Blog, and have been published on BikePortland.

You can see some of my transportation writing by checking out the links in the sidebar.

Prior to doing advocacy and encouragement in Portland, I volunteered with the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition and did a lot of riding and hiking, including Waves to Wine 2008.

Right now I’m waiting for Portland to get serious about active transportation and being quietly supportive of advocate friends behind the scenes.

Linguistics

I graduated from Rice University in May 2003 (Jones College, B.A. Linguistics & Cognitive Science). In 2005, I received my MSc from the University of Edinburgh in Speech and Language Processing.

Until 2010 I was a linguist in the technology industry in Silicon Valley (and Portland). I worked at Sensory, Inc. for almost five years as a linguist and project manager. I created and tested speech recognition vocabularies for customer products including toys with Playmates and Hasbro, clocks with Natural Time Set™ and Bluetooth headsets with BlueAnt, Plantronics, and Motorola. I also worked as the customer linguist and internal project manager for speech synthesis development for just over two years and gathered recording data for recognition testing, speech output, and speech synthesis.

Other Things

I like music, food, wine, whiskey, writing, and one-on-one teaching and mentorship. At school I was in the Marching Owl Band and performed in musicals (including many with the Rice Light Opera Society) and sang in the EUMS Chorus. I also wrote FAQ content for LiveJournal.com and web content for Rice’s IT department and worked as a linguistics TA.

I do a lot of cooking, reading, hanging out with friends, and exploring the city I live in. I enjoy niche YouTube subjects like British archaeology and art restoration. I take pictures. I like musicals. I prefer tea to coffee and both of them to beer. I think a lot about systems, beauty, and community. I’m more inclined to the real than the surreal.

Oh, and cats. I like those too.