Unless otherwise noted all pictures and text are by and copyright 2004 Mike Strong
 Me at the Cafe Paradiso in Haight-Ashbury. Photo by Evelyn Miller. |
Mike StrongPhotographer - Dancer - Journalist - LecturerWeb Monkey - Technical Writer - Photo-Lab Technician Teacher - Multi-Media guy - Proud ex-waiter and ex-bartender Web Sites: http://www.kcdance.com http://www.artfuldance.com http://www.aameps.com For Resume see below - For my Photo-Illustrated CV Click here. |
Web Sites
KCDance.Com:
is my Guide to Kansas City Social Dancing and some Performance work.
Dance Calendar, Photos, Venue information: KCDance.Com is my Guide to Kansas City Social Dancing.
www.kcdance.com
- Where to learn: Good lessons at bargain rates. Private lessons (studios and individuals).
- Where to dance. Locations with descriptions of features dancers look for such as the floor, the crowd, music and more.
- Calender of current social-dance events.
- Pictures of Places of Dancers of Events.
Dance Pictures:
Photographic dance art. You can buy still pictures in museum-quality frameable form.
www.artfuldancer.comOnline Lessons:
Lessons in multi-media, streaming, video and database conducted online. You can enroll via PACE at UMKC.
www.artfuldancer.com/lessonsAAMEPS:
Grab-bag of several usages and themes, some temporary.
www.aameps.com
Programmer
Web Monkey (programmer) with UMKC's now former Computer Science Program - the BIT program - January or February of 1999 to the end of 2000 - I came to the program as a web programmer doing underlying code and architecture to support the new online learning we were developing from scratch. This included the pages, quiz structures, data structures to support quizzes, grading and more, as well as media delivery for both audio and video - and training the professors who were using this. This is the program Dick Hetherington built up to more than 740 students at the time of his retirement
American Crane and Tractor Parts - March or April 2000 to March 2003 - American Crane is in the west bottoms (across the road from the Kemper). Essentially it is a car parts store, except that the parts are for Caterpillar tractors and other equipment, sold across the globe, wholesale to other wholesellers and to dealers. The sales pages are far more complicated than shopping cart pages because they need to accomodate dealers who are looking through long lists of parts (sometimes several thousand at a time in a row and column format and they need to be aware of special considerations for the way in which various items are sold, or are sold only in groups, or what their original number have changed to. Then the program needs to be able to determine warehouse operations from stocking to picking and packing orders and deciding how and whether to combine them. All of this needs to be sent across the web to remote locations from the US, to South America, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, to computers which may have very slow connections
AutoScript® occupied most of my time in the 1990's as my day job, first by contract on and off for two and a half years starting in Fall of 1989 and full time for six and a half years until October 1998. AutoScript was discontinued in September 1998. The finish work lasted into October.
Take a look at the program screens and at the list of program features. This may be one of the last places you will see this because Preco Industries decided to end the AutoScript division after more than ten years.
CAD Publisher (Autoset), out of Australia, offers equivalent capability.
Their web site was at: http://www.jwgraphics.com.auUPDATE (28 December 2009) : This site is now gone, replaced by a parasitic link farm. I have to guess that CAD Publisher is also no longer available.
John Walker is (was?) the head of the firm.
His last email was walkerjr@jwgraphics.com.au - you might give it a try.
Their last phone number in Melbourne, Australia was 613 9879 4388 (from the US: 011 613 9879 4388)NOTE: Perhaps the same technology changes also eventually made CAD Publisher obsolete. AutoScript was a niche product which was being eclipsed by advances in tech and there was no way we could keep up with the changes. Too many people would have to have been added to staff and the niche of rendering was already being eaten up by the product itself. So when AutoScript closed up (September 1998) it was really a matter of time before what AutoScript did in providing PostScript fonts, shading and output would be overtaken by other methods to acheive the same result. All in all AutoScript lasted about 11 years (from 1987) which in the changing world of software is a long time and in the conditional-love world of niches to fill is a very long time especially for a niche which has enough main-stream demand that niche opening would soon be filled by the people who, themselves, left it open.
Dance Database When my list of dance spots became too large to edit directly I wrote a dance database to take care of generating the HTML code listing the dance locations, and a calendar of events. This is open to dance teachers and organizations to add information.
Batch Plotter for AutoCad. Written in Visual Basic this program uses AutoCad R-14 (or later) as an (unseen) object to plot drawing files. It can be used locally or across a network and as a user-run program or in a server role to plot drawing requests from computers without AutoCad. It is used by machinists, the purchasing department, technical documentators and drafters. BPlot.exe is the 1998 successor to DWGP.exe, a program I wrote in 1992 using PDS 7.0 (extended Quick Basic) for DOS. The program is not available.
Photo Gallery
My photos: general interest, friends, dancing (web link). One of my oldest photo pages from my archives. I've been shooting since 1967 and webbing since 1994.
Example from a typical catalog flyer shoot.
Web Site Creation, Programming
My advice on creating a web site. This is basic information you need to create your own web pages. I provide information about design, site purpose, and images.
You might also look at two major web sites I put together with partner Nicole English at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). We were the "web monkeys" who actually did the initial hands-on work for the BIT (Bachelor of Information in Technology) degree program at UMKC. See (moved)
In addition we put together and we team-taught IT-222, Multimedia on the web starting with the Winter semester of 2000. This was taught by both of us in both the classroom and on the web. The first semester we had around 30 students, in summer a few more than that and in fall around 80 students - all without advertising, just word of mouth. The course home page is at (moved)
Spiritual
My own experiences and reflections.
The experiences include a "parting visitation," a pair of "pre"cognitive events, and more. No religious dogma and definitely no preaching. These are are my accounts of real events as they happened to me with my observations.
Or Click here for an informal Resume