User:Arthurpjohnson

Arthur P. Johnson was educated at Swarthmore College, where he received his B.A. with Highest Honors in the Humanities, and at Oxford University (B.Phil., English Language and Literature), which he attended as a Marshall Scholar. He then left academia in order to make a living and lives in the United States. He is ancient enough to have studied Fortran IV as a lad, and purchased his first IBM PC in 1983, mostly because he couldn't touch-type, a grave disability for a professional writer. (No disrespect to Apple -- his real desire was a Wang until the smartypants kid who owned the local PC store showed him MultiMate.) Two weeks later he added a 1200 baud Hayes Modem and started proto-blogging on a 300 baud dailup site that was run, he later found, by a bunch of 13-year-old nerds. This pre-Internet creature ran so slowly, you could watch the letters appear one by one, but the upside was that everyone read every single word. When the Internet happened, he started Wine People, mostly as a showpiece for clients who wanted to get started in Web marketing. Of course, he soon discovered the wages for Web writing are pathetic, but by then Wine People was actually getting read by the oenophile In Crowd, so he let it devour his scant spare time until about 2005. So many people were blogging by then, he decided it was no longer cool. (He despises the very term "blog," promoted by honest-to-gosh newspaper journalists who quite rightly wish to differentiate themselves from us no-rules, no-editor, no-fact-checkers, parasitic low-lifes who may do whatever we please and not get paid for it.) More importantly, Wine People was written with Microsoft Front Page and so had become a lumbering, slow-loading, Java-encumbered, Chrome-averse dinosaur -- impossible to port except page-by-page. (He keeps it alive and invites you to visit, realizing that it's a fossil.) In the next six years, he got a life, got a tiny bit well-known for Other Things and eventually got the itch to start another site. Bored to tears of writing about wine, he turned to the greatest geek attraction of our time, aka tech. Arthur P. Johnson's TECH TAKES is still in alpha, but he encourages you to waste lots of time on it and ponder its vast shortcomings; he tries to update it weekly. He is a passionate advocate for integrative medicine, meaning that he believes in results, period, and suspects there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of at medical schools. He is the author of the King of Cats, a children's book (Stoddart, 1993) to which he retains copyright for the text, and is proud of his involvement in numerous health publications, including The World's Greatest Treasury of Health Secrets and Ultimate Healing (both copyright Bottom Line Books.) In real life, he remains Grand Poobah and Renaissance Man of Arthur Johnson Associates, LLC, the preeminent consulting firm in its field. If you’re wondering what its field may be, you plainly have too much time on your hands and should take up golf or knitting.