Microsoft Or Bust!

Education:

Post-Doc: Fulbright Research Fellow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1988, at that time in the German Democratic Republic. Research project: Missing characters in socialist East German narrative. Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Frank Hörnigk.


Why did I go to East Germany? Because it was seven years into the Reagan era, and I thought a change of criminal dictatorships would be refreshing. It was. The experience restored somewhat my respect for this country (which was running a clean program--I was never recruited as an intelligence source) and the GDR taught me unforgettably the folly of excessive trust in good intentions.

M.A., Ph.D. (English), University of Washington, 1982, 1985. Dissertation: Joyce's Nonce Symbols, a study of shifting and fragmentary symbolic patterns in the works of James Joyce, with glances at the meaning of Joyce's methods for our contemporary understanding of literature and language. Dissertation director: Prof. Hazard Adams.

Footnote: Just look what my teaching assistant successors at the U-Dub have been up to. Long live the United Auto Workers! For the record, my generation had its own (threatened) labor action in 1981, when the legislature tried to cut our tuition waivers in order to fix their bankrupt Republican budget. We threatened to strike, and the university came up with money. Now that's what I call getting an education! In other news, my old home department seems to be suffering from a wave of defections.


B.A. (English Major, German Minor), University of Alabama, 1980. My mentors: Prof. John Burke and Prof. Salli Davis.

Not reflected in this official outcome of my undergraduate history is my original major -- physics -- and my elective coursework in a variety of scientific fields. I always loved science, and later computers, but since I was averaging a "C" in math/physics and an "A" in English, I became a humanist ... of a sort.

Scholarly Directions:

• European modernism
• James Joyce
• The German Democratic Republic (1949-1990)
• Christoph Hein
• Literary theory
• Computer-enhanced teaching

Influences:

Hazard Adams	Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)	Fritz Senn

Jacques Derrida 1930-2004

Remembrance on NPR / Photo from http://fixion.sytes.net/pardonEng.htm

What I Did With My Computer Last Summer:

• Linux 
• Development of Inquisition, a database-driven courseware suite
• Co-Development of Knowledge Surveyor, a Web-based course assessment tool
• Faculty mentor to the Georgia Southern Beowulf Cluster (2000-2002)
• Co-founder of the first GSU Linux Users Group (1999) and ongoing Linux activist
• Participant, ITS Technical Representatives Luncheon (2001-present)
  
  

  GSU Films Report on Beowulf Supercomputer for Television Release There I am in the middle with Jacob Galbreath (left). See more Beowulf project pictures Video (Requires RealAudio)

Employment History:

• Professor, Georgia Southern University (Promoted 2003 ... H.F.T.)

  Growth, promise, opportunity, responsibility, success, politics, scheming, venality, envy, incompetence, retaliation, vindictiveness, coping, disappointment, isolation, uncertainty, stasis, support, loyalty, innovation, transformation, change.

• Contract Technical Editor for Microsoft Press (2001-2007)
  

  Working as a technical editor with Microsoft Press for seven years and counting. The company has a regrettable distaste for anything involving open source or free (as in libre) software, but that's their problem, not mine.

• Associate Professor, Georgia Southern University (1994-2003)
• Assistant Professor, Georgia Southern University (1990-94)
• Temporary Assistant Professor, Georgia Southern University (1988-1990)
• Temporary Assistant Professor, Stetson University (1986-87)

  Young and foolish, trailing clouds of glory from graduate school, I think I managed to offend nearly everybody. I suppose it is good to have one job to burn up and throw away early in your career. Still, it was a reasonably pleasant place to spend a couple of years, and Florida was quite amazing.

• Temporary Instructor, University of Washington (1985-86)

  My first full-time teaching job. The best part may have been membership in the faculty club and parking in the Padelford lot. At least, those were the worst things in the view of those who wished graduates would remember their place. And so my education in the academic caste system was well underway.

Selected Publications:

• Robinson, David W., interviewer, editor, & translator. Under Construction: Nine East German Lives. McFarland, 2004. 218 pp.
• Robinson, David W. Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein's Literature of Dissent. Camden House, 1999. 237 pp.
• Robinson, David W., ed. No Man's Land: East German Drama After the Wall. Contemporary Theatre Review 4, ii (1995). 222 pp.

• Robinson, David W., tech. rev. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out. By Errin O'Connor. Microsoft Press, 2007. 672 pp.
• Robinson, David, tech. rev. Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. By Ted Pattison and Daniel Larson. Microsoft Press, 2007. 398 pp. "Few books focus just on the core foundation of SharePoint, WSS v3. In this book, Ted and Dan did a fantastic job of covering all the bases necessary. Even though I've been in the SharePoint world for years, and the betas for this current version for over 1.5 years, I was amazed how much stuff I picked up that I wasn't aware of. This is THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO WSS v3 FOR DEVELOPERS! It should be on ~everyone's~ desk if you're doing SharePoint development" (Amazon customer review).
• Robinson, David W., tech. ed. Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0. By Arthur Greef et al. Microsoft Press, 2006. 544 pp. "Of course, we also want to thank the people at Microsoft Press who helped support us throughout the book writing and publishing process [including] David W. Robinson, the technical editor, who asked the authors all the painful (and right) questions as he made his way through the numerous code examples in the book. We owe him a lot for this effort" (Authors' acknowledgments, at Addison-Wesley Safari Books Online).
• Robinson, David, tech. ed. Microsoft Outlook Version 2002 Plain & Simple. By Jim Boyce. Microsoft Press, 2001. 261 pp.
• Robinson, David, tech. ed. Server+ Certification Training Kit. By Robert Bogue. Microsoft Press, 2001. Includes CD-ROM. 481 pp. "You won't find much difference in the dryness of this book as compared to other offerings from Microsoft, but if you can make it through the book, you will find that this is a one technically accurate resource" (Amazon customer review).

• Robinson, David W. "Müller's 'Forsaken Texts Waiting for History' Find Their American Moment." Proceedings of the 2005 New York City conference on Heiner Müller in America. (Forthcoming.)
• Robinson, David W. "'Ach! Wie gebrechlich ist der Mensch, ihr Götter': The Life and After-Life of the East German Marxist Menschenbild." Aufklärung und Kritik. Sonderheft 10, 2005: Was bleibt von Marxismus? Pp. 284-296.
• Robinson, David W. "Abortion as Repression in Christoph Hein's The Distant Lover." New German Critique 58 (1993): 65-78.
• Robinson, David. "'Was geht mich deine Leiche an?': Bemerkungen zur Fremdheit und Anpassung von Heiner Müller in den Vereinigten Staaten." Dokumentation einer vorläufigen Erfahrung: Texte zum Werk Heiner Müllers. Ed. Annett Gröschner. Veröffentlichung der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1991. Pp. 89-98.
• Robinson, David W., and Caren Town. "'Who Dealt these Cards?': The Excluded Narrators of Go Down, Moses." Twentieth Century Literature 37, ii (1991): 192-206. [On the short-story collection / novel by William Faulkner.]
• Robinson, David W. "The Narration of Reading in Joyce's 'The Sisters,' 'An Encounter,' and 'Araby.'" Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29, iv (1987): 377-396.
• Robinson, David W. "Stephen Dedalus's Physics Lesson." James Joyce Quarterly 24, iii (1987): 359-362. [On the fanciful use of science in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.]

Hotline to Wisdom:

About the Hardware (since you asked . . . )

Ogeechee These Web pages are hosted on a Hewlett Packard Netserver LH Plus. It is big. It is loud. It is ugly. It drives non-geeks from my presence. Specs: Dual Pentium-II 300 MHz processors, 314 MB RAM, six front-mounted SCSI drives. Operating system: Debian Linux (Sarge). As host ogeechee.litphil.georgiasouthern.edu, it resides in my Georgia Southern office. (PHPsysinfo)
	The Raq My IRC server is a Cobalt Raq2. (I just have one, not a stack of them.) Specs: 250 MHz MIPS RISC processor, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB IDE hard drive. Thin, blue, glows in the dark. Operating system: Debian Linux (Sarge). It lives on my home network as part of oneeyedman.net. (PHPsysinfo)

Employed at Georgia Southern 1988-2008. Thanks for all the fish!