Scott Bush

Theodore Roosevelt said in 1903: “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” He was right then, and his statement is still true today. Many good, qualified people are looking for that chance to work hard, so why should a company hire me? Because I view employment as a give-and-take relationship: I give sincere effort and dedication, while I take the experience and education of the position and grow from it.

[ more to come... in the meantime, you can view my old portfolio. Just don't hold me accountable for its table-laden structure. It was 2003 and I didn't know better then ]

Welcome to my online portfolio, where I’ve put together examples of projects from my career, education, and volunteer work. Of course, this site would all be rather dry without some personal information about me. And what kind of online portfolio would be complete without a résumé?

Find examples of design, writing, and thinking from these categories:

• Career
• Education
• Volunteer

The other evening Crystal and I watched Children of Heaven, a wonderful Iranian film from 1997 (though it looks like it was shot in the 70s). It’s remarkable to see how a family in Tehran lives in (essentially) the same era we do. The story revolves around a boy who loses his sister’s pink shoes and how he tries to replace them. While he looks, he and is sister (who is the cutest little thing ever) share his white, threadbare sneakers. Not only heartwarming, this film made me appreciate what I have.

The opening scene sets the tone for how different life is for these people. The boy, Ali, is waiting for his sister’s shoes to be mended. Mended. When’s the last time you or anyone you know had their shoes mended? Sure, it is out of necessity, but a culture that values items enough to mend rather than throw away is very respectable.

Examples of the difficulty of living in Iran abound, but you don’t feel sorry for these people as much as you respect their fortitude. I especially admired the way children were respectful not only to the adults in authority (represented by a wooden ruler in one case!) but to each other. It is a really sweet film.

Thursday evening Crystal and I attended the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Comedy of Errors. What a blast! They set it in a Louisiana bayou with a pirate theme. It’s Shakespeare, so just about any locale can work. The acting was excellent, though my favorite character was Dromio of Aeschylus: he had me rolling. Plus, our seats are in the front row of an intimate theatre so we were right in the action. In fact, I was poked with sword as one of the Antipholuses ran up the aisle next to me.
This is our second season as ticket holders and we’ve really enjoyed it. It feels great to be a part of the theatre community as season ticket holders. We’ve been nothing but impressed with SSC and plan to continue supporting them. The best so far, ironically, wasn’t a Shakespeare play, but Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Wow, what a play!

I found out today that one of my favorite punctuation marks—the m-dash—can’t be used in standard comments in an XHTML 1.0-strict document. To be correct, it’s actually the m-dash’s plain-text facsimile the double hyphen, that can’t be used. It goes without saying that the HTML special character equivalent: — isn’t very readable when it’s not rendered.
Why would anyone be using m-dashes in a code comment? Well, I do! I like to write notes to people viewing my pages’ source to explain certain things I’ve done. As a writer, I love the m-dash—it’s short and powerful. Validating my pages agains the W3C’s Markup Validation Service showed me that it’s not allowed because:

invalid comment declaration: found name start character outside comment but inside comment declaration.

So I went back to the less awesome but similar parenthesis for my comments. Oh well. Me and like two other people in the world care.

In honor of my carpooler’s birthday yesterday, we stopped in at Starbucks for a birthday drink. (I had gift cards, don’t worry.) I tried a tall cinnamon dolce latté, their latest substitute for real coffee. Here’s how it went:
Me: “I’ve never had one of these… I don’t like things too sweet”
Barista: “Oh, it’s not too sweet! People are usually suprised at how not sweet this one is.”
Me: “Well… okay, I’ll try it with the regular amount of syrup then.”
Barista: “Great! You’ll love it!”
So, I waited briefly for my “not too sweet” drink. Of course, I waited until we were on our way again before taking my first sip. Tasty, yes, but very sweet. My tastebuds glassed over and were unable to detect any coffee flavor. Did they mistakenly replace my espresso with another few shots of syrup? Oh well… at least it was only $3.25 for twelve ounces: quite a bargain, to be sure.
Moral of the story? Don’t listen to the sugar-addled baristas at St. Arbucks and go with plain lattés or half-pump syrups.