I'm been living here in southern California now since August 2000 after living close to 30 years - more than half of my life - in cool northern Denmark. Read about my life there on my Denmark page, where there is also a link to pictures from our trip there in 2004.
I sing alto in the Claremont Chorale, for which I was the Board Secretary for a couple of years. 24 members of the Chorale visited Puebla, Mexico in July 2006 to participate in the VII annual Festival Mundial de Coro along with chorales from 8 other countries. I have several sets of pictures from there at Flickr as well. I am presently doing various graphics for the Chorale, and have uploaded some of them to my Portfolio page.
I am also a member of Chapter KX of the international women's organization, PEO.
I'd enjoy your feedback to my website.
The Environment
A guiding light through much of my activities the past many years has been the environment. My Honda Insight car (and my husband's Prius), various jobs and charities as well as my daily life are all influenced by this interest. Read more on my environment page, where there are also links to information and organizations.
I am mostly interested in environmental management methods that use a "carrot" rather than the "stick" of compliancy to involve industry and people in saving the environment of this wonderful country and the world.
My environmental interests are particularly in the area of Energy and Global Warming. The Sierra Club initiative Cool Cities is my newest interest. I am working to get Upland committed to becoming a green city.
My newest initiative is working as an independent direct sales associate for a new company which envisions getting solar PV panels on 25% of American roofs wtihin the next 20 years.
Heifer International
Please read here about my favorite charity and consider supporting Heifer's work helping the world's poor help themselves with animals that they raise sustainably and "Give on the Gift" of the first female offspring to a neighbor.
Technical Writing
I have morphed through the years from teacher to technical writer! (links)
The Inland Empire Society for Technical Communication (IESTC) led me to completing the Certificate in Technical Writing at UC Riverside, which I enjoyed immensely. I am also the IESTC Council Secretary and contribute to its newsletter Ruff Draft, which I edited for the 2004-5 season until I got too busy with other activities. My issues won the STC merit award for Chapter newsletters. I was also the newsletter editor for the STC Environmental, Health and Safety Community. I hope you enjoy our newsletter, which won an Excellence award in the 2005 STC newsletter competition. More recently, I completely revised the website to match the design of the newsletter. If you are an STC member, you can read the WIKI section there.
I have created guidelines and manuals, translated technical texts (from Danish to English and German) and made or redesigned websites for at least 15 years. Although much of my earliest work was in Danish, or not available, as the property of an employer, I have been able to gather quite a collection of article, manuals and things in my portfolio to show some examples of my work.
Most recently I've become very interested in single-sourcing modularly written documentation using XML, in particular using the DITA framework. This is includes DTDs or XML Schemas for a minimal nuber of document types used in technical documentation, originally developed at IBM.
Links about Technical Writing
Society for Technical Communication
www.iestc.org: Inland Empire Society for Technical Communication
http://www.stc.org/: Society for Technical Communication.
http://www.stc.org/sig_info.asp: Information and links to the STC special interest groups
http://www.stcsig.org/esh: STC Environmental, Safety and Health Communications SIG site, including the newsletter I edit.
http://www.stcsig.org/usability: STC Usability SIG site
http://www.stcsig.org/ss: STC Single Sourcing SIG site
DITA
Here are a few of the many DITA resources online. You can find references to more from these sites.
http://dita.xml.org with lots of information and links
IBM started it all. This is their DITA library
COMTECH consultants, white papers and DITA guide
The Content Wrangler has DITA articles
PTC's Arbortext with a number of white pages
XMetaL with whitepapers
Resources for Technical Writers
www.identifont.com/: Identifont - to identify fonts
www.untechnicalpress.com/: Untechnical Press has some good resources
www.devguru.com/: DevGuru has complete quick references to all the code you'd ever want.
I check them constantly while doing css style sheets.
www.508help.org: Avencom Accessibility §508 Compliance) tutorial
www.section508.gov/508: Government site with tutorials on §508
www.webaim.org/simulations/screenreader: Simulation for the screen reader used by the visually challenged.