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Steve Tuffill
center|Yes, This is ME!
Website:	http://stevetuf.blogspot.com/
Employer:	None right now... make me an offer I cannot refuse!
Occupation:	Technical Writer, novelist
Other roles:	technical support, software engineer,
Nationality:	US
Country:	USA
	email
This user was certified a Wiki Apprentice Level 2 by Nelliemuller .

Profile

Current Situation

Hi, my name is Steve Tuffill and I am currently unemployed, having been laid off by Intuit. Due to the current economy, it has been pretty hard to find another position. However, I am working on this full time now! :)

More About My Background

Computer Technical Support and Technical Writing

What I bring to the table is fifteen years of supporting MS Windows, Unix and Linux, and Apple Macintosh systems. Also, I have spent most of my recent years developing technical documents for Intuit's Financial Institutions Division here in California. Also, I have a degree in English and pride myself on great English and perfectly constructed sentences! I write for several wikis, having started a wiki for my firm while I was at Intuit. The first one I started was a failure. I didn't get management buy-in and nobody wanted to take part. Let this be a lesson to all of you: if you don't have the support of the people, your wiki will die! The second one was a resounding success, not because there was any different content - the content was pretty nearly identical. I just had management buy-in and the blessing of those who had control of the organization. Also, the second wiki was hosted on a company-approved platform, and although we had to make a few changes to get the wiki to a workable level so that we could have people add content without too much effort, it was a going concern in a few short weeks. Nowadays, after I have left, I consider this to be my legacy to them, and I have confirmed that people look here first for answers to complex technical configuration problems.

Teacher of Video Editing and 2 Second Stop-Frame Animation

I have spent much of my working life in the broadcast and entertainment field. For over six years, I worked aboard the mv Pacific Princess as an assistant to the Cruise Director and, before that, I was working for both the BBC and Thames Television in London. Later, I taught students how to create short animated or live videos, using the technology which was around at that time. (Having cut my teeth on manual caption production for British television, I find all the latter digital video techniques remarkably easy in comparison!)

One day, a group of students I taught in Great Britain decided to spend a day creating an environmental message video and they enlisted my help. I didn't have to help them much. They had a clear concept and started the work at around eight am. By five o'clock, they had a two minute video, which was a great piece of animation. They were three fresher girls. Two had worked the rostrum camera and set up the staging area and the third girl positioned herself (she actually lay down on her back) in the area where the action was to be filmed. The animation video took a common theme of the day and focused on the destruction of the environment by mankind's pollution. The girl started with a smile on her face, and this was augmented by the serenity all around her, where there were green fields, trees, plentiful vegetation, flowers and pleasant scenery. As the day wore on, the other girls slowly "loaded" face and body with symbolic artefacts of pollution, black coal (to symbolize the fossil fuel usage), lumps of concrete (small but big enough to convey the message!) and reasonably friendly (to their co-worker) items of pollution like cartons of used food and empty cigarette packets. They also began to paint her face grayer and grayer. Gradually, the girl's face was "loaded" with symbolic asphalt and concrete, and slowly the smile drained from her face. The resulting video was really meaningful and won a prize for creative thinking! It was a very rewarding experience working with those three fresher girls that day and even though I was there to help them with the technical aspects of getting the video produced using stop-frame animation, I got a lot out of the experience!

Web Sites

I like to help people create great web sites, and, although I am only beginning to learn this, I have managed to help a number of people, including Nergis Kern's SL Experiments site which is another wiki in development and which is a major initiative and focus point for developing language learning and teaching in Second Life.

(: Congratulations on a wonderful start, Steve. Your technical expertise and experiences are very impressive and an asset to WE community. You may not work as a teacher, but you are engaging in best practices by showing care and helping others. --Nellie Deutsch 05:47, 29 November 2008 (UTC))