User:William Porquet

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"...I am at an educational conference listening to a speech by a high authority in the field. I know him to be a good scholar, a dedicated servant of society, and an admirable person. Yet his speech is a muddy river of clichés, flowing stickily into a delta of banalities at the peroration. The content of the speech does not do justice to his mind: what it does reflect is the state of his literary education. It is not that he has never read good literature, for he has the literary tastes that one would expect a cultivated man to have. But he has never been trained to think rhetorically, to visualize his abstractions, to subordinate logic and sequences to the insights of metaphor and simile, to realize that figures of speech are not the ornaments of language, but the elements of both language and thought. And because his main scholarly interests lie outside literature, he has never been compelled to make up for these deficiencies himself. The result is that he is fluent without being articulate, and cannot break out of an armour of ready-made phrases when he tries to express his real convictions. Once again, nothing can now be done for him: there are no courses in remedial metaphor." - from The Stubborn Structure by Northrop Frye (Metheun 1970)

Bio

• Born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1969

• Graduated from Breton Education Centre (New Waterford, Nova Scotia) in 1987 (high school diploma with honours)

• Graduated from Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia) in 1992 (B.A., psychology)

• Graduated from Goddard College (Plainfield, Vermont, U.S.A.) in 1996 (M.A., cultural studies)

Career History

Some highlights...

• Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Park, Louisbourg, Nova Scotia - historic park interpreter/animator/docent, musketeer/cannoneer, military musician (summers 1988-1996)

• UUNet Canada - NOC technician/jr. systems administrator (1997-1998)

• Maptuit Corporation - systems administrator (2000-2002)

• Novator Systems Inc. - systems administrator (2005-2006)

• C.O.R.E. Feature Animation - systems support for Disney's feature animation The Wild (2003-2005)

• MessageLabs Canada - technical author, 2007-present

Hobbies and Interests

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• Established http://www.2038.org/ - a popular, often-quoted year-2038 readiness project Web site with a multi-platform Open Source (GPL) year-2038 software toolkit for diagnosing compliance: http://www.bumperactive.com/archives/000773.jsp

• Authored "Windows Hygiene 101" article for neophyte Windows users: http://www.deepsky.com/~merovech/Windows_Hygiene_101.html

• RADARSAT basics workshop, in co-operation with the Civil Engineering Department of Ryerson Polytechnic University and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo, 1999: trained on NASA-grade satellite imagery analysis software on Solaris platform

• Maybe Logic Academy, Tale Of The Tribe: an Internet correspondence writing workshop with the late Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, August-November 2005: studied the works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Vannevar Bush, and Marshall MacLuhan as proto-hypertext

• Other interests include heraldry, vexillology, singing, karaoke, Celtic folk music, playing on a pub trivia league, and working on French language skills

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