ENTRY ZERO (D. Gerlach - VC 101)

Good morning classmates… This is my first blog post (and my first blog)… So this is Entry Zero – and will serve as a test post.

My name is David Gerlach. I have been dwelling in Tucson for 16 months now. I left southeast Pennsylvania to come to Tucson in March, 2009, following my wife, who has been a U of AZ graduate student since the Fall of 2008. I had a great job working for the State of PA, and did not want to come out here out here until I had a decent job lined up. Nine months later, I finally got lucky and scored a job with the U of AZ, working in their I.T. department.

I have an Associate’s Degree in Computer Networking from a community college back in PA. I used it to transfer into a two-year BAS program at NAU. My major is Technology Management. As I had over 100 credits from my previous school, I have a lot of my current curriculum fulfilled, although I still require 56 credits from NAU. So to fulfill these credits, I get to take a few electives of my personal choice. This past Spring, I took a Technical Writing course which I really enjoyed; I appreciated most of all the lessons on graphic design and document/website presentation. Wanting to know more about this subject, I decided to take this course as an elective. I feel I have a decent eye for good and bad design – but I desire to fully understand what constitutes good design… and what makes for bad design.

On a personal note, I’m 35 years old, married, no kids. Having nearly 15 years telecommunications experience, I work full-time supporting a university’s network and communications infrastructure. Apart from a Photoshop and an HTML course both taken about 7-8 years ago, I have little background in visual communications. Hobbies include bicycling, hiking/trekking, gaming, and traveling (just visited Yosemite National Park – It was amazing!).

I originally tried to copy and paste this from my draft I'm building in Word, and Blogger did not accept it. Apparently, MS Word has a lot of HTML encoded in it. I simply copy and pasted into notepad, and then pasted again in to here. It should work now.