Woozle

Introduction to Woozles

A woozle is a phenomenon caused by obsessively following one's own footsteps while thinking you are covering new ground. The presence of a woozle generally can be taken as an indication that you have become too focused on your immediate task and need to take a look at the larger picture in order to see where you have gone wrong.

Introduction to This Woozle

This particular woozle can be found in Durham, NC and various places on the internet. More contact info (including mailing address and instant messaging) is here.

(Woozle's internal/notes page is here, but most of it probably won't mean anything to anyone else.)

Projects

Woozle is now switching to first person for the rest of this page. Do not adjust your sets.

Commercial

My commercial projects include:

• vbz.net, an online store which is operating but under reconstruction.
• Various computer services which will eventually have a web site of their own:
  • On-site computer service (including Windows and Linux)
  • Web site programming (MediaWiki, MySQL, and PHP a specialty)

I'm available for more work in either of these areas, though my time is currently more limited than I like -- mostly due to time spent on Josh, Harena's autistic teenaged son. We are making progress in this area and I'm hoping that my time will be significantly expanded by this summer (I'm writing this in January 2008).

Community

My non-commercial / community-related projects include:

• HTYP, a wiki-based online "directory of everything" and "technical manual for the universe"
• Issuepedia, a wiki-based site for discussing and documenting public issues (including local ones)

Both of these sites are advertising-free, with no registration required to edit. (I wrote my own spam filter from scratch so that I wouldn't have to close down registration in order to prevent wikispam.)

Opportunities

There are a number of things I'd like to be doing but lack one or more critical elements.

• Recording studio: I have enough equipment to set up a small but income-generating recording studio; I lack the space, and I also wouldn't have the time to run it on a daily basis (at least until the Josh situation improves). I could, however, help get it set up and put some time into technical maintenance.
• VBZ expansion: I ultimately want to make vbz.net easier to run and hand over its daily operation to someone else; eventually I'd like to see it move into a physical storefront, and expand from there. I would also like to offer more work by local artists and musicians, as this is why I got into online retail in the first place. See vbz.net for more details.