i was born after the summer of love, three months and ten days after neil armstrong made the first slip of the tongue on the moon. the historically literate will be able to send me a felicitous email greeting on my birthday.

n-1 years have passed since then, and i've graduated from gradeschool, highschool, and (finally) college. i just lost my third girlfriend, and second fiancee. i was hoping that the third time would be the charm, because she was really great, but it wasn't. not a lot you can do about these things sometimes. so i'm kind of bummed about that right now, but i'm not letting it make me miserable or anything. we tried hard and it just didn't work out; c'est la vie. so i have no idea what to do with my love life at the moment. for now i'm not doing anything with it, which is probably for the best.

i spent my early college years studying engineering, and then when i decided i didn't like all that math i switched to technical writing. so that's what i'm doing now, and i like it. my mission in life is to save the world from bad software documentation, because lord knows i've had to suffer through enough of it. i have a feeling i may die a frustrated man, though. oh well.

it's a good thing i didn't pursue my original interest, which was architecture and city planning. at least, that's what my grandpa said. he said that city planners die frustrated and bitter men. so maybe it's just as well i didn't like all that math, although i may fare no better in software documentation.

i used to be a consultant at the university of washington's computer center. they made us call ourselves "lab assistants" officially, but frankly, we do more than that title implies, so i call myself a consultant. and i don't think that's hubris, either. but i went and graduated, so i couldn't work there anymore. too bad for them; i was good.

now to pay the rest of the bills i work as a technical writer at microsoft. yes, the evil empire, as my erstwhile housemate wim calls it. too bad for him; one of my other housemates, jared, works there too, so wim's outvoted. wim is one of those NeXT fanatics. in fact, i'm logged on from his slab right now (at least, i was when i originally wrote this document).

anyway, enough about me. if you care enough to spend the packets, you can click on this picture of me (152k). i'm the one in the foreground, the one exhibiting much healthier wrist posture than the guy in the background (that's justin. i can't show you his home page because he doesn't have it on a machine with a running web server). this picture was taken with a digital camera at the aforementioned u.w. computer center.

oh yeah; my name is jason black, and no, i don't like capital letters. they're loud, and i'm a pretty quiet sort of person. i can't help it if your www browser likes to show titles and headings and stuff with capital letters. of late, though, i'm finding myself forced to use more and more of them. i have to use them at work, and i admit i use them on some of my web pages, but not here, anyway!