Hello, my name is Rich Ackerman. That "Harvey" is an alias used to confuse junk mailers. My wife, Carrie, and my two boys, Hoxie and Nate, live with me in a 1924 Fort Lauderdale antique.

I took two LIS courses at USF before transferring into this program. I built the "Ackerman Archives" for a Digital Libraries course there so I have a head start on DL buzzwords!

My work experience has been building and managing software products in electronic publishing and office automation. I work now for a software company providing sales force training for Fortune 500 coporations. I'd like to move into an application or service oriented position working in a digital library, museum, or archival setting after my spell at FSU.

I've used many computers. I can design and implement software, databases, and web sites with a variety of tools and languages. My graphic skills are rather limited although I enjoy design involving typography. I like Emacs and Opera. I can solve technical problems.

This semester I've read (recreational reading):

• A collection of Danny Pearl's articles (worth a read)
• See No Evil, Robert Baer (great book by one of the CIA's few experts on terrorism)
• The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression by Harold James (better than Sominex: puts you to sleep in a minute and definitely NOT habit forming
• Country matters : the pleasures and tribulations by Michael Korda (fun read, esp if you've ever lived in the country)
• RoseLee Goldberg's biography of Laurie Anderson (lots of pictures, very little personal info)
• Laurel Fay's biography of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (good for music history; dry otherwise)

My website at www.hray.com has more personal information, along with some interesting material on World War I and a collection of user-contributed English language idioms. If you have any good regional expressions please visit and add them to our database.

I look forward to working with all of you for the next few semesters.

Rich

While waiting for our last orientatation session to start, I wrote The Emotalizer, a program that reads ichat logs and counts emoticons. A logical enhancement would be the Vocalizer Module, to count contributions by person. My Research Methods class has made me wonder about the ethics of that, though... You can see the results here. We smile and nod a lot!

update: At the end of the semester, my Research Methods instructor made us grade our own participation. It was worth 25 out of 1000 points. I extended The Emotalizer to count contributions by each person in the class (look below the emoticons.)

Updated December 30, 2002