User:Carljs27

I am starting a user page for Carljs27 so I can receive messages and advice regarding contributions to Wikipedia.

Here's some information about me:

High School and college at St. Martin's in Lacey, WA, planning to be a Benedictine Monk until I discovered girls and fell madly in love in the middle of my Sophomore year of college (a late bloomer, but better late than never!) Double major in Math & Philosophy.

One year in the Doctoral Program in Math at Duke, dropped out when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I joined a peaceful student protest in support of low-paid campus janitors & maids, all of whom were black (http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/alumni/dm15/vigil.html), then joined the Peace Corps to teach English and Math in a remote village in the highlands of Ethiopia for two years.

Worked two years as a conscientious objector in Seattle, on the 11pm - 7 am shift at The Open Door Clinic, a "Free Clinic" that did crisis intervention ("Bad trips", drug overdoses, etc.) and supplied various kinds of help, including a medical clinic, for "street people" and others.

Worked six years in business journalism and as a freelance writer in New York City. I worked at McGraw-Hill ("Metals Week" and "Modern Plastics" & Fairchild Publications (started up "Energy User News" during the Carter "Energy Crisis"), and published a number of freelance articles including two on holography and atherosclerosis for a magazine published by the New York Academy of Sciences.

Worked for IBM for 25 years as a writer/editor (wrote a history of the development of magnetic data storage) and, starting in 1996, was responsible for starting up and maintaining www.ibm.com/storage

Discovered Vipassana meditation shortly after retiring from IBM, and then connected with Pariyatti, a nonprofit bookstore & publishing housed focused on the teachings of the Buddha. I've been working at Pariyatti since the summer of 2005 but plan to retire early in 2011 to spend more time on hobbies like riding my recumbent trike, hiking, photography, and - in my dreams - seeing the view from the top of Mt. Rainier.