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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>, more info these days will be on GitHub<\/a> or LinkedIn.<\/a><\/p>\n Between 2009 and 2014 I volunteered with the\u00c2\u00a0BTA<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and PBOT’s\u00c2\u00a0Active Transportation<\/a> group as an Ambassador, and was involved with Active Right of Way<\/a>. In summer 2011 I worked at\u00c2\u00a0SMART<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0in Wilsonville as a Program Assistant on the\u00c2\u00a0Discover Wilsonville<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0SmartTrips-style individualized marketing program. I’ve written for\u00c2\u00a0Portland Afoot<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and the\u00c2\u00a0WPC Blog<\/a>, and have been published on\u00c2\u00a0BikePortland<\/a>.<\/p>\n You can see some of my transportation writing by checking out the links in the sidebar.<\/p>\n Prior to doing advocacy and encouragement in Portland, I volunteered with the\u00c2\u00a0Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and did a lot of riding and hiking, including\u00c2\u00a0Waves to Wine 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n Right now I’m waiting for Portland to get serious about active transportation and being quietly supportive of advocate friends behind the scenes.<\/p>\n I graduated from\u00c2\u00a0Rice University<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0in May 2003 (Jones College<\/a>, B.A. Linguistics & Cognitive Science). In 2005, I received my MSc from the\u00c2\u00a0University of Edinburgh<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0in\u00c2\u00a0Speech and Language Processing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Until 2010 I was a linguist in the technology industry in Silicon Valley (and Portland). I worked at\u00c2\u00a0Sensory, Inc.<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0for 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\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 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.<\/p>\n I like music, food, wine, whiskey, writing, and one-on-one teaching and mentorship. At school I was in the Marching Owl Band<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and performed in musicals (including many with the\u00c2\u00a0Rice Light Opera Society<\/a>) and sang in the\u00c2\u00a0EUMS Chorus<\/a>. I also wrote FAQ content for\u00c2\u00a0LiveJournal.com<\/a> and web content for Rice’s IT department and worked as a linguistics TA.<\/p>\nActive Transportation<\/h2>\n
Linguistics<\/h2>\n
Other Things<\/h2>\n