Recommended Reading... Mark Kruger's Christmas Tidings

A literary masterpiece destined to be told from generation to generation among web developers everywhere...

Twas the Night Before Merger
"Twas the night before the Merger, when all through the Net, Not a Web site was stirring, not even devnet..."

  Monster Resume Writing Service

I'd like to recommend the Monster resume writing service. Recently I decided it was time to update my resume, especially since my entire career history before Macromedia was in Biology, and I had nothing to reflect the professional computer skills and web-related technologies I've learned in the last 4 to 5 years. I've come a long way since my first BASIC program in 1981 or my first HTML page in 1994.

The service requires that you first complete one of 4 resume wizards, depending on which type is appropriate for your industry or career level. That wizard entails a very lengthy and highly detailed battery of questions requiring not only details and facts but short answers or essays. These questions address your professional career, educational background, certification levels, and has a variety of customizations. I spent 6 hours on a Saturday afternoon completing a wizard because I put a lot of thought into how I responded to questions such as:

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  Brandeis Mountain Club Ice Climbing on Arethusa Falls in Crawford Notch

The February 6th ice climbing trip was a great success! Sarah, Alex, Rebecca, Kas, Adina, and Steve spent the night in North Conway, New Hampshire to get an early start the next day to meet our guides at Ragged Mountain Outfitters.

We had the great technical expertise of Ian Turnbull and Kurt Winkler, guides from the Mountain Guides Alliance. From the beginning they provided very careful instruction about the proper fitting and use of various items such as climbing boots, crampons, harnesses, and helmets. Both guides were really great and explained everything with patience and good humour.

View the photo gallery from this trip.

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  An Account of a Winter Hike in The White Mountains

Backpacking in the White Mountains, New Hampshire with the Brandeis Mountain Club, November 1998.

We started on saturday in the White Mountains, not far from Mt. Washington. It was snowing already, and on our ascent we found heavy ice and a thin layer of snow which made for delicate walking. Soon the snow became deeper, 4-6 inches, and that made traction easier and walking less treacherous. The pace was comfortable, but still we were carrying full backpacks and making a steep climb over difficult terrain. The surrounding pine trees were bowed over with the weight of the heavy snow on their branches, but still their evergreen color showed through.

After a few hours, we climbed halfway on our trail in attempt to make the peak of Mt. Jackson. The snow grew increasingly deep, and there was a high frequency of fallen trees blocking the trail, the fallen trees came from an ice storm early last year which wreaked havoc on the northeast. The climb was really becoming an adventure now, and not just a hike in the woods. Much of the walking required that you stamp your foot into the snow with each step to get good footing, and was punctuated often by the necessity of getting on knees and elbows to skirt underneath the fallen trees.

Several members of our 7 person group began to show fatigue and a loss of morale, but we agreed to push on. Later, as we approached a to within an hours walk of the peak, the snow became 18-24 inches deep, which futher fatigued the group. Not far from the treeline, where the alpine treeless landscape begins, there were three older men returning from the peak. They warned us that above treeline was white-out conditions, deep snowdrifts, and 40 mph winds. With some trepidation, our group voted to continue carefully, and quickly we found ourselves leaving the safety of the evergreen trees, and walking in a barren snowscape with fierce winds that almost pushed us over.

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  Excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on Gradeless Systems

I'd like to share this passage from Robert Pirsig's classic novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. This passage speaks to the motivations for learning and how the quest for a high grade ought not to be confused with the quest for comprehension or mastery of a skill or subject. The author speculates that a gradeless University system would be more effective than one that emphasises perfunctory hoop-jumping with a grade as the objective rather than the goal.

Upon my resignation from graduate school at the University of Colorado Health Science Center (UCHSC) Department of Neuroscience in 1997, I appended this excerpt to my letter of withdrawal.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

[His] argument for the abolition of the degree and grading system produced a nonplussed or negative reaction in all but a few students at first, since it seemed, on first judgment, to destroy the whole University system. One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, "Of course you can’t eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that’s what we’re here for."

She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and the mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.

The demonstrator was an argument that elimination of grades and degrees would destroy this hypocrisy. Rather than deal with generalities it dealt with the specific career of an imaginary student who more or less typified what was found in the classroom, a student completely conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent.

Such a student, the demonstrator hypothesized, would go to his first class, get his first assignment and probably do it out of habit. He might go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life was not his only life, the pressure of other obligations or events would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get an assignment completed adequately.

Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed he’d completed the assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty.

In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difficult for him to pay attention in class. Eventually he would see he wasn’t learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he would stop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached.

But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybody’s part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.

The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and -whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system", is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, "location" point of view, but it’s not the [true learning]’s attitude. [True learning]’s attitude is that civilization, or " the system ", or "society", or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one he’d abandoned, in what used to be called the "school of hard knocks." Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe that’s what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe he’d found his level. But don’t count on it.

In time six months; five years, perhaps a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become re-awakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He’d think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn’t have the theoretical information, he’d now find a brand of theoretical information which he’d have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he’d see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would be likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren’t directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.

  Letter of withdrawal from the Neuroscience Program at the UCHSC

In 1997, I was accepted to a gradauate program in Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Health Science Center. Of the 4 students accepted that year, I was one of two accepted early, and so I began my research project in June. Working in Paula Bickford's lab on the effects of oxidative damage in brain with implications for ageing, I enjoyed a wonderful summer especially since I lived right on Colfax, just a block from the lab. In August I began the fall classes, including Neurobiology (1), Cell Biology (2), Biochemistry of Proteins (3), Laboratory Methods in Neuroscience (4), and Seminar (5). There was also the required lab rotation, consuming some 20+ hours per week. The classes were outstanding, but I felt that the demand was too much and that too much emphasis was placed on volume of classes rather than quality of learning. Note that these were 4 very difficult classes, plus seminar, plus lab rotations. I spent every waking hour reading, working, and attending class, but I felt there was simply not enough time to master the subjects at the level I expected of myself for graduate level. I recently checked the curriculum for the program in 2004, and I found that the program had since changed and now it only required two difficult courses per semester rather than four.

I departed the university for a few days in October that year to give it some thought, and during that time I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM). This book, especially this passage, encouraged my decision to withdraw from the program.

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  North Bridge on the River Concord

Not too long after college, during my first winter after moving to New England, and while still clinging to literary tendencies, I was inspired to write the following poem. It was a late January night and I had just returned from a walk in the snow from my house to the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. As I recall, I then sent this off to a new penpal from Germany that I met in Seattle, Bettina Hahne.

The North Bridge on the River Concord
Snow scattered thick over wooden board
Charred oak smells, filtered to my senses
Stoned walls let loose, no longer fences
Perfect glass crystals bounce off the cheek
While a distant glow grows faint and weak
Drifting music of snow.. angelic.. light
Ghostly gray trees dancing in brilliant night
Within domain of the Minuteman's stare
Do Henry's words echo, first here, then there
The pervasive ether of night-falling snow
Melds into one, dream and life as I know

Concord Photo Gallery

  A Night on the Thorofare

It was late August of 1994, and I found myself once again riding the National Park shuttle bus to to my first dropoff point int the Denali wilderness. I was issued a permit to spend a week backpacking in several of the most desired areas of the park. This was easy to do, travelling alone. Each of the park's 43 zones, tens of thousands of acres each, has a limit of only six or eight people per zone.

One night I was in front of Mount Eilson on a river bar. It had taken several hours to hike down from the park road and to scout around for a attractive site. I made my camp on a hard, little mud flat. That evening I watched a grizzly searching for berries and ground squirrels on the river bank of the Thorofare river. The river is actually fed from some of the glacial meltoff in the Alaska range. Most of these rivers are very narrow and very fast. They braid out and crisscross around, creating a wide bed, but only occuping a small portion. Crossing one of these is more dangerous than most anything else because they are decieving and can trick you to believe they are easy to cross. Many of the riverbanks themselves are usually very steep, in a way that sort of traps you if you are trying to get off the bed.

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  Creative Writing Project #3: Into The Yellow Wood (1992)

I remember Mama.

You see, this morning I opened up the travel section in the Sunday paper to find a flashy ad that told me I could spend four days and three nights gambling, drinking, or sunbathing on one of the gaudiest Caribbean islands for what amounted to about a week's salary for me. That's gross...
salary, I mean. But that's not for me. I could find all that right down the street if that's what I wanted. No, I've always been a 'fly by the seat of my pants' kind of traveler, never paying for much more than an airline or train ticket . I'd rather opt for a youth hostel or tent than plush hotel accommodations that insulate a traveler from being submersed knee-deep in the local culture. Out on the road, like Jack Kerouac, that's where the most fun is. That's where the people are. And that's where you'll find me. On the road, where I am most at home.

This is where Mama comes in. She was always smiling at all the passer-bys, and if she ever got a hold on you, look out. CRUNCH! She'd give you a hug that'd squeeze the devil out of you It was on the Island of San Salvador where she sat everyday at the intersection of a two street town, in the cool shade of the Talking Tree, while she weaved palm leaves into broad-rimmed hats and two-handled baskets that read 'San Sal' in bright red yarn.

She was a cunning old gal. She'd wait patiently for the college students who came to study at the research station, the only source of outside visitors on the island. The deep folds in the fabric of Mama's coton white skirt seemed to run clear up to the time worn folds in her dimpled cheeks. Whenever my fellow students and I would stroll through town, Mama would flash that inviting grin of hers, wave her arms, and softly shout, 'Come to Mama, darlings,' with an irresistible charm. That was the hook.

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  Fireweed and Ice

As we coasted along the tracks of the Alaska Railroad on a sleepy August afternoon, I stood between cars and stared down the length of the train.

Almost like an unexpected summer snowfall, there was a rush of white puffs past the portal, and extending continuously across the horizon, almost thicker than the air itself.

The sun shone warmly as it backlit each puffball to a warm glow. It was difficult to tell if we were moving against the flowery shower, or if the low, billowy clouds had been blowing a like a gusty breath across our motionless train.

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