Getting settled in

So after the flight home to Florida from the PSO, I made it to Portland in 4 days. We found a house on the outskirts of the city and were able to get our place furnished all with free stuff from craigslist and freecycle :D (still looking for a table though). We even found some free tomato plants and some other pre-started veggies for 50 cents each.

Portland seems pretty cool; I think it's different than Florida yet similar at the same time. I like the fact that there are a ton of parks, local business, co-ops, collectives, biking and gardening stuff. The city itself is comprised of distinct yet compacted and connected neighborhoods so suburban sprawl has been kept to a minimal level.

But I was expecting there to be more trees in the city (there are zero downtown and not much old growth in the residential areas) and really surprised to find out that there is a lot of heavily polluting industry here. The port is actually a Superfund site, meaning the government is funding the cleanup of toxic waste since the original responsible corporations are no longer around (the actual people might still be, but ridiculously, corporations are defined like people under US law so they usually get off scot free when the business goes under or is sold, etc).

Besides the view from NTEN's office (as long as you don't look at the port), I like the fact that my supervisor is really nice and seems to be way more open and respectful than other supervisor's I have had (especially in grad school). However, I have been doing nothing but data-entry and administrative stuff since I arrived. Although I certainly don't mind some if it helps others, my wrist was sore from all the repetition. It helped a little bit when I located a decent macro application to slightly automate the transfer of thousands of member entries between two different databases we are using for "constituency relationship management" (CRM). Yes, this is only one of the many buzzwords I have learned over the past few weeks. Personally, I am not a big fan of wannabe catchy pop phrases. But I'll have to save that for another post :).

Fortunately, it looks like I will be moving on to doing less data-entry. I will be posting weekly round ups of interesting discussion on NTEN's Affinity Groups (fancy mailing lists that are user-driven, i.e. anyone can create one). I also will be developing materials for assisting moderators of the groups. To get practical experience, I created my own group about free/open-source software and Linux. Hopefully, the trend of less data-entry will continue as I become more familiar with the organization.

Btw, I highly recommend you check out NTEN's website if you have not already. There is a ton of information and lots of different groups in the Affinity Groups platform that might be a good resource for a wide range of things.

Comment from Sarah Pierantoni on July 17, 2007 - 9:32am

Hey Rob! Hope the cross country drive was awesome. Good luck with everything...

Comment from Jack Waugh on July 19, 2007 - 6:48pm

In re "I am not a big fan of wannabe catchy pop phrases", I'm on board with you on that one. Nothing takes the place of good old plain language.

--
Jack Waugh
703-863-3200

Comment from Morgan Sully on August 28, 2007 - 2:28pm

I'm wondering what's up with catchy pop phrases too. Though I did laugh when someone asked at a conference last year if there was a site where they could go to "download Web 2.0" - They were earnest though, yet I'm laughing? How do you reconcile the 'digital knowledge affluence' you swim in with the disparities of the world? How can your efforts as a knowledgeable, fresh out of college VISTA support others? Explore what tricks exist.

In the meantime, some txt humor 4 u: