About

The word “About” is pretty vague. Does it mean “about the person” or “about the website”? In this case, it's both. Let's give this a shot.

Contact

To contact me, send email to my first name (Evan) at my last name (Goer) dot org. You can also find me:

But the best contact method is email.

Bio

As it says on the front page, my name is Evan Goer, and I'm a technical writer working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My family moved to the Bay Area in 1977, so technically, I'm not a native. But by California standards, moving here when you're less than three years old is basically the equivalent of being a flinty-eyed ninth generation New Hampshire farmer.[1]. My theory is that if you've lived here over ten years, you are transformed into a Real Californian and have earned the right to start looking down on all those newcomers. From that point on, the only person who is allowed to look down on you is Joan Didion.

I attended public elementary school, middle school, and high school in and around my hometown of Sunnyvale, CA. After that, college at Harvey Mudd, followed by a year of graduate school at UCSB. It turns out that there's a big difference between "being pretty good at physics homework and tests" and "being a successful working physicist." So off into the world of work I went!

Fortunately, in 1999 they were hiring any doofus who could manage to drag himself to a career fair and drop a resume on a table.[2] Even more fortunately, my new boss brought me into a fantastic group of writers who took me under their wing, even though I was a lowly contractor.[3] And so I've been working happily as a technical writer ever since. What I love about tech writing is that it has such a great balance between the technology, the writing, and the social. Also there's the fact that you will never, ever carry a pager. Ever heard of a "tech pubs emergency"? Neither have I.[4][5]

1. In New Hampshire, obviously.

2. I had vaguely heard of this "technical writing" thing -- it was technical, and I was technical. And it involved writing, and I liked writing! So there you go.

3. Who couldn't tell you what the passive voice was to save his life.

4. Which is not strictly true. There was that one time I got flown off on very short notice to Amsterdam, but that was unusual to say the least.

5. Are you an engineer? Are you looking for work-life balance? Look no farther than technical writing, my friend.

Website

This website is powered by Movable Type 5.02. I've been using MT for many years. Before that, the site and the journal was completely hand-coded, until I realized that was kind of silly.

This site uses HTML 5. Not because I'm using any HTML 5 features per se. Mostly I just like the remarkably short and cute DOCTYPE.

For layout, I use the outstanding YUI CSS libraries made available by my colleagues down the hall at Yahoo!. At this point, anyone who doesn't at least use Fonts and Reset is stark raving mad.

The primary font for this site is Garamond. Which Garamond, you ask? I honestly have no idea. Whatever Garamond your browser displays when the site says font-family: garamond. The one thing I do know is that it is not the Garamond that typography nerds really, really hate.

The banner at the top is composed of the following images, used under Creative Commons license:

As for why I started up Journal, that's all due to my blogmother, Marissa Lingen. Without her, there would be a website of sorts, but there would be no Bad Movie Classification System, no HTML House of Horror, no Magazines for the West Coast Elitist, and worst of all, no pie.

Copyright

In the footer, you'll see a Copyright section that says “Some Rights Reserved”.

Every page where that little message appears is under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You can freely copy and produce derivative works from these pages, as long as you give me proper attribution. At a minimum, proper attribution means that you should link back to my site and mention my full name, "Evan Goer". If you are reposting or remixing my text, I would love to hear from you about what you're doing. But technically, you don't have to inform me, let alone ask for permission — that's the beauty of Creative Commons.

Note that if you stumble across a page that does not have the Creative Commons image, then full copyright applies. Also, the Creative Commons license doesn't apply to blog comments. Other than that, go nuts!

Privacy

This site does not attempt to track individual visitors in any way. The site does record the number and types of pages requested over time, but this information is used only for statistical purposes.

This site does not provide your personal information to other parties under any circumstances. If you do choose to leave your contact information on this site, you will not be placed on any mailing lists.

If you have any questions about how your information will be handled, please don't hesitate to ask.