1. Who Andrew Is
Andrew Shi-hwa Che, born on October 6, 1975.
2. What Andrew Does
See the ResumeOutline for what Andrew’s job is and stuff like that.
He does some other things too – like post to Andrew’s Blog occasionally, as well as communicate with Connie who has “adopted” Andrew as her “little brother” – and he her as his “older sister”. Andrew is happy about this “adoption”. 🙂
He also reads, talks, writes software (hence how this site got it’s name: Andrew’s SoftWare = AndrewSW), and more.
3. When Andrew Does It
Whenever inspired.
4. Why Andrew Does It
Sometime around high school I stopped reading a lot of the fiction that I loved to read because I felt guilty that I had taken in so much good content and not contributed any back. So I stuttered along trying to produce some good content, but all my poetry submissions during my undergraduate were rejected from the campus poetry publication, and I never finished any of the stories that I began (other than the few OnePagePlays, which perhaps I shall recreate here at some point in time), but, in short, no one seemed to appreciate what I attempted to produce.
So I let my desire to produce content lay dormant for a while (I still have a HalfFinishedStory or two that I might put up one of these days).
Then, I discovered blogging and other web-based content mechanisms. At first, I didn’t have much to do with them, but then I began to get fascinated by reading again. Only this time, instead of fiction, it was non-fiction – maybe I’ll put a ListOfFascinatingNonfiction online one of these days for the reader’s edification. And I wanted people to discuss such things with. And I found very few in my immediate vicinity. So I went online. And I fould that the world of blogging had really grown, with sophisticated protocols like TrackBack and PingBack and stuff like that.
Concurrently with all that, I had established http://www.AndrewSW.com as a way to share software I had written for myself with others, and possibly get some money from it. In the desire for money I made it a point to avoid using things like MovableType and such for my content management because it wasn’t to be used for “commercial” purposes.
But now, after reading up on all sorts of licensing issues I realize that what I’d be better off doing is just running an ordinary blog using something like MovableType and posting my software and asking for donations to help support the development of the software. After all, this isn’t my primary source of income. (In terms of AmazonAssociate revenue, this isn’t quite breaking even yet….)
Anyway, as I was trying to get money off my site, I realized that content is what drives traffic to a website (see ContentDrivesVisitors ), and so my 2002 NewYearsResolution was to add new content to my site every day. Unfortunately I was using SIPS and while I could potentially write a script to import it into b2, doing so would have been tedious to go through and categorize everything appropriately. Besides, many of those postings were things that more appropriately belong in a wiki and so I intent to gradually import them in. Knowing full well that search engines may still have results linking to old articles, I’m going to great lengths to put appropriate redirects in place so that they’ll still get to the content that is being searched for.
But, after I got into the grove using b2 I realized that by putting content on my website, I could do what I thought I should have been doing long ago – give content back and “making up” as it were, for all the content that I had been reading. So that’s what I’m trying to do now with this site.
But what motivates my content? Ah – well, technically I guess I’m a reactionary liberal. You’re probably wondering what the heck that means. I’m a liberal in the sense that I believe most liberal reforms are probably good – in the long run. I’m a reactionary in the sense that I don’t think the world is ready for most of these, and so I often work to slow the pace of such things. Blogging is one example, however, where I think things worked out right – just as we begin to become aware of our reliance on mass media and the influence of mass media, we find a way to help us return to something similar to what we had been – instead of neighbors sitting on their porch yelling to each other, we are now neighbors sitting on our websites linking to each other and commenting on each other’s sites. Either is a definite improvement over not having any contact with neighbors at all.
5 How Andrew Does It
With whatever suitable tools he can find. Be sure to check WikiBlogIntegration for some details. He/I/Andrew also uses PHP, the PythonLanguage, MySQL and some other tools.
6 Where Andrew Does It
To play it safe with the UniversityAcceptableUsePolicy at the institution he presently attends (see EducationOfAndrew), Andrew only works on his potentially “commercial” website from his own equipment. It was in honor of the UniversityAcceptableUsePolicy that Andrew named his Blogger blog – My.UAUP.Blog – the blog that Andrew updates whenever he is on university equipment.
Andrew has lived in a variety of places, including “upstate” New York, Richmond, Virginia, and now in East Lansing, Michigan.
7 Addendum
Everything is a work in progress, that’s why nothing on this site is totally done right or completely – someone once said “if it is worth doing, it is worth doing wrong”. Free free to contact Andrew if you have ideas/suggestions/etc… for more information he should put here.
8 Appendix
Andrew likes the concept of Spring from UserCreations. The following image, in addition to being an image of Andrew, is also a “Spring Object” and can be dragged into any Spring canvas.
