Curriculum VitÆ
Education | Professional Experience | Expertise | Literary Pursuits
Stop14 is the sole proprietorship of Bill Kennedy, a longtime new media developer and literary type. Here’s a brief rundown of some of my accomplishments and experience:
Education
- MASTERS DEGREE — English Literature, University of Toronto, 1992. No, my formal education is not in computer science, but you should ask me sometime about my theories on Henry James and the new information economy.
Professional Experience
- SOLE PROPRIETOR, STOP14 MEDIA (2003+). Stop14 is fresh out of the blocks, and has recently done sites for the Canadian Children’s Book Centre and The Scream Literary Festival. We’ve also designed books for the Mercury Press, and are currently at the proof-of-concept stage in the development of an XML-based metadata format and concurrent web/print publishing system for Canadian literary publishers.
- FOUNDING PARTNER AND INFORMATION ARCHITECT, RHIZOMEDIA (1999-2002). I was one of three partners in the New Media firm Rhizomedia. We developed a strong philosophy of functional design with an emphasis on content management, a philosphy that also informs Stop14. Our early projects included websites for Destination Artic, The Dominion Bond Rating Service (through the now defunct I.C.E.), Global Mechanic and the Arctic CTE Product Club. Our primary client, however, was Ryerson University’s Continuing Education program, for whom we developed a massive custom content management system. This XML-based system allows them to update their course and administrative information in a single database and publish that information either to the web or to a Quark XPress-based printed calendar. All of the content on the site is both live and dynamic including the navigation, meaning that Ryerson CE can move pages (or even subsections) from one part of the site to another with a single adustment to the database and have their changes instantly reflected in the navigation menus. My roles on the Ryerson CE project were information design and architecture as well as technical production and implementation. During my time with Rhizomedia I also created a number of templates and presentations on behalf of Ove Design.
- NEW MEDIA DESIGNER, SPENCER FRANCEY PETERS (1995-1998). I worked for one of Canada’s largest design firms in the early years of the internet boom. The job was perfect for a generalist like me — I did everything from platform interoperability (specializing in translating files from the Mac-centred world of design to the PC-saturated offices of their clients), to CD-ROM development (in Macromedia Director and the late lamented Apple Media Tool) to template design (in every Office suite imaginable) to Web Design and backend coding. One of the major projects seen through my tenure at Spencer Francey Peters was the Four Seasons Powerpoint Templating System. This was a major application that allowed the Four Seasons’ worldwide sales force to generate professional quality, consistently branded Powerpoint presentations. I coded and implented the proof-of-concept, using the VBA programming language (built into Microsoft Office) to allow the users to select images from the Four Seasons’ massive database of custom photography as well as pre-built slide suites that were tailored to particular sales situations. Other major clients included: Canada Post, Toronto Hydro and ScotiaBank.
- DOCUMENT SPECIALIST, BELL SYGMA (1993-1995). I worked as a contactor designing and developing internal documents (newsletters, financial reports, executive summaries, Microsoft Office templates) for the (now defunct) Research and Development wing of Bell Canada Enterprises. This job included complex Microsoft Office development (VBA coding, incorporation of live financial data in reports, etc.) and lots of functional design work. One of my major tasks was to migrate their internal documents from their Lotus Notes environment to a new-fangled HTML-based intranet.
- NEW MEDIA FREELANCER (1993-1995). As well as working at Bell Sygma I developed templates for numerous design firms across Toronto, including Tudhope, Ove, LeapFrog and Simplified Communications. Some of the major clients included TSN (there was a job – they needed templates developed in three serparate word processing formats, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect 4.1 and the mercifully little known AmiPro), Yorkton Securities and the Bank of Montreal.
- HACKER, SECOND CLASS. My first computer was an Apple ][e that my parents bought when I was in Grade Six. I wrote my first serious BASIC program by Grade Seven, and spent the next few years hacking around doing things I probably shouldn't have. My first job (the summer after Grade Eight) was to teach Seymour Papert’s Logo programming language to primary and junior students at a summer computer day-camp. For the next 10 years I worked at the Scarborough Board of Education on various internal publishing projects using generation after generation of Apple Macintoshes. Throughout university I worked on a number of UofT computing projects, hacking around on UNIX systems and being intrigued by metadata formats like SGML. I first encountered the world wide web through an all-text browser and was pretty nonplussed after hearing so much hype about it. Of course, I couldn't see the layout or the pictures. Everything changed once I did.
Apostrophe Engine: You are reading a curriculum vitÆ
you are telling me • you are saying 'oh,
i get it!' it's magnificent! • you
are having particular kinds of mood and eating problems and
wonder how certain nutrients can eliminate carb cravings • you
are the victim of a basic misunderstanding • you are applying
to an institution where english is the language of discourse,
people read left to right and top to bottom • you are
applying for an assistant professor position in an english
department, the reader already knows you have or will soon
have a phd in english • you are abd or have had an unusual
career path you shouldn't try to hide it, but neither do you
want it to be the first thing a search committee member learns
about you • you are selling yourself as a marketable
person and so tailor it to whom you are going to send it to • you
are applying for a job in catering, stress your catering expertise,
but if you want to work at a fast-track management, stress
your experience in leading and motivating people and teams • you
are writing this cv and what sort of job you are looking for • you
are applying for a job to be a doctor, so does it matter how
fast you can type? keep it focussed on the business side -
a good golf handicap is not a key skill • you are applying
to find out who deals with recruitment • you are competing
with many people with similar skills sets for the same role • you
are ready to tackle actually writing the résumé • you
are sending it • you
are sending your résumé, and you've chosen to
use the chronological style • you are trying to get a
sense of proportion, devote about five to seven lines to education
and list at least four previous jobs • you
are looking for a job • you are expected
to have developed skills along with your innate curiosity • you
are invited to engage in open discussion of the ideas and viewpoints • you
are using the correct version for that position • you
are doing a self-appraisal • you are on your way to an
interview...
Expertise
Here are some of the technologies I’m familiar with, done in rapid-fire keyword format.
- WEB: HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS1 and 2, JavaScript, Perl, ASP, and PHP.
- DATA: MySQL, Access, and Mircosoft SQLServer.
- PRINT: Quark Xpress, Acrobat/PDF, Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.
- TEMPLATING: Microsoft Office (Access, Excel, Powerpoint, Word), including VBA.
Literary Experience and other sundry pursuits
- CHAIR, THE SCREAM LITERARY FESTIVAL (2001 to present). I'm been the executive chair of the Scream Literary Festival for the past few years, though I've been involved since its inception in 1992. Formerly known as the Scream in High Park, the festival includes Canada’s largest single-day audience for a literary event, with crowds of up to 1000 people attending a nighttime reading in High Park. The Scream has expanded its mandate during my tenure as executive chair, becoming a full-fledged multi-day, multi-venue literary festival. Over the course of the next couple of years we’ll be initiating many new projects... including digitizing the entire archive of Scream performances and making them available online.
- CO-ORGANIZER, THE LEXICONJURY READING SERIES. Bored with the state of literary readings in Toronto, co-organizer Angela Rawlings and I started a monthly reading series, determined to break all the rules. Lexiconjury been going strong for years now despite flauting most of the common wisdom surrounding literary performance. I ran my first reasing series at the Café May over ten years ago, back when there was only one venue in the city.
- COLUMNIST, REVIEWER AND ALL-AROUND OPINIONATED GUY. I've been writing a monthly column in The Word, a local literary magazine as well as regular reviews for publications like Broken Pencil. Articles and other writing have also appeared in various art, academic and management magazines such as the Boston Review, The Design Management Journal, Existere, Object, Open Letter, and others.
- WRITER AND EDITOR. My major literary claim to fame is the Apostrophe Engine, a Perl-based program that generates a poem in which every line begins with the address “you are”. The script takes a given line or search term, submits it to Google, then sends a horde of web bots to gather matching information from the resulting web pages. The apostrophe engine will be live by the end of the year. See the sidebar for a brief excerpt from “you are reading a curriculum vitae”, generated in less than 20 seconds.