Light Posting over the Next Few Days

In response to recent requests for a bio, I'd just like to say that I am a software developer, who was once employed in forestry projects in a third world country, and did a short stint in Africa. Prior to that I headed up a nongovernment organization helping mountain tribes title their ancestral lands in largely insurgent-controlled areas and was a staff adviser for about three years to a third world government attempting to reach a negotiated settlement with Islamic rebels. Before that, I led a largely footloose life, including a year as a ragpicker. I have a graduate degree in public policy from a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts and another in applied mathematics from the midwest.

It used to be said that the nice thing about the Internet was that nobody cared if you were a dog: that your presence on the web was wholly separable from your existence as a person. That, as I've discovered, isn't wholly true although it should be; nothing is should truer or more false simply on the basis of provenance. But I should have realized that in this uncertain hour, the words 'who goes there?', so long in disuse, would come to preface every conversation. It is that kind of time and so be it.

Regards,

W.