We browse home pages not so much to learn about an individual as to hopefully find some cool links that we'd like to chase down. But isn't it refreshing to see something of the person in the things they take the time to organize for their own use? I hope that you enjoy the voyage of discovery on the Web as much as I do!
Don R. Day
donday@bga.com
I was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1953. My father, Fred A Day, was Physical Plant Director at New Mexico State University, and my mother was an art teacher at local schools. My older sister, Becca, was born near Walnut Springs, Texas. My younger sister, Lisa, was born in Las Cruces. Our home was a house on the NMSU campus near the diary, just across a ditch from the sweet-smelling alfalfa stacks that I would often play on.
Perhaps because of the
proximity of White Sands Missile Range, or because of the
research-related activity during the years from IGY (1957-58) through
the Apollo and Star Wars era, I was keenly interested in rockets and
astronomy. The back yard of the Physical Science Laboratory
was close by, and had wonderful spent missile parts that my friends and
I would play among. These things surely contributed to the
technical direction I have taken in life. And I keep some of
that youthful vision in my present hobbies: model rocketry,
photography,
But my family provided the other great influences in my life. My older sister was a wonderful musician even as a teen, so I grew up listening to her pop and folk tastes (my love for guitar and female vocals) and her classical pieces on piano and viola. My father built a Hallicrafter "Hi Fi" tube amplifier kit that had a massive corner speaker, and through which he first played Ferrante and Teicher's Sound Blast album (which had a rocket on the cover--what an motif to represent all my childhood memories!), Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, and Mancini's Music for Mr. Lucky. My mother's art decorated the house. As my younger sister grew older, Iron Butterfly and Beatles played through that tired old tube amp.
I graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1971 and went on to New Mexico State University for my Bachelors Degree in English and Journalism. What? no science? Well, I had a knack for writing, and during my freshman year I received some counsel to the effect of following strengths more than interests. Ah, that classical tension has accompanied me all through life. If I could live it all over, I might have taken the Physics and Astronomy path instead. I came face to face with my tension and life choices when one of my English readings was Gary Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This insightful book builds on the observation that "Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic." My world was torn: My interests were classic and technical, while my abilities were romantic, expressive. Oh, how to find a clear direction forward with this sort of tension?
I felt that I had found my calling when I learned of a new Technical Writing program at NMSU, which gave me the vision to unite my writing skills with my technical bent. This program gave me the chance to dive back into the sciences that I loved so much, and I got my Masters degree with a Major in Technical and Professional Writing and a minor in Computer Science. I pictured myself as a prophet, one who makes great thoughts palpable to the throngs, in a profession that seemed to me to be the perfect amalgam of Classic and Romantic intent, of science and humanities.
Two great events marked my
educational years. Between High School and college, I became
a believer in Jesus Christ, moving from the Sunday School knowledge I
had about Him to the experiential relationship of knowing Him as my
Savior and Lord. And between my degrees, I met my best friend
and soulmate for life, Kathy Ann Olson, who married me in 1978.
Between the growing
responsibilities of starting a family (Jennifer and Tamara), leading
music and being a deacon at church, and writing a Master's Thesis, I
managed to graduate in 1983 and began my job search. IBM's
Kingston,New York site made an offer, and Kathy and I agreed that it
would be responsible to our young family to make this move so as not to
lose a chance at a good career path. In June of 1984, we moved to New
York and bought a two-story Victorian home in the laid-back town of
Kingston, at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, and spent 9 memorable
years there. In 1993, as IBM began to phase out the Kingston
site, I got an offer to relocate to Austin Texas, and so we moved
again, buying a home in north Austin near Round Rock.
I worked in Austin as part of a
group that supported the OS/2 operating system, the one plausible
contender to Microsoft's already-established domination of the PC
desktop. I worked on SGML standards and tools, helping to define ways
to convert IBM's legacy information into a new format that was coming
on the scene, HTML for the World Wide Web. As XML was being
defined, I began developing some Web-based transcoding tools for
delivering XML content almost directly to browsers. This
experience with transforms gave me the background to step into my first
formal standards role, IBM's primary representative to the World Wide
Web Consortium's committee for developing the Extensible Stylesheet
Language, or XSL. I was IBM's rep during the development of
the 1.0 specification, currently still the dominant version in use for
transforming and rendering XML content for reading.
As XML started gaining
attention as a coming standard, IBM's User Technologies organization
tasked me to lead a workgroup to explore XML's potential for IBM and to
recommend its future use for the company. The workgroup
developed a topic-oriented architecture that we called the Darwin
Information Typing Architecture.
To ensure that IBM got the best long-term value from the design, we
published the design and some demo tools in the spring of 2001. In
2004, IBM donated the architecture to the OASIS Open standards
organization, and I became the Chair of the OASIS DITA Technical
Committee. Later in 2004, IBM also donated the toolkit to
Open Source, and I am presently managing that public development
activity.
Other factoids: I am a cat
lover, I landscaped a goldfish pond in my back yard, I used to play
pretty funky guitar (Jorma Kaukonen, John Fahey, Ry Cooder
influences--not as much time now to "plink"), I like to sing bass and
tenor parts for hymns, and I collect old folding cameras, which to me
represent my Classic/Romantic tension (they are simple and beautiful,
yet functional, and the lenses actually represent manufacturing
tolerances of millionths of an inch, which intrigues me to see embedded
in the wood, cloth, and leather parts of a folding camera).
Favorite authors: A.W. Tozer, Loren Eiseley and Douglas Adams.
Design Intervention--Fred Day's unique slant on woodwork! (newspaper article)