What Do You Do? What Have You Done?

[Dmitry]

What have you done, dentist boy, besides screw up peoples' teeth? 

I am but a speck of dust on the great vinyl record of life.

If you tell me you wrote your hundreds of articles under a pen name, like Georges Sand, I'll believe you.

Edited August 16, 2003 by Dmitry

[Daniel A]

Come on Dmitry! Not everything is to be found online. As a matter of fact, I don't believe that any of the articles I wrote for our high-school paper are online!

[Dmitry]

Come on Dmitry! Not everything is to be found online. As a matter of fact, I don't believe that any of the articles I wrote for our high-school paper are online!

I guess I'll just have to believe Greg wrote hundreds of scientific articles in peer reviewed journals and there's no mention of any of them anywhere in the Google galaxy.

It'll be tough after the Mnytime fiasco, but what the hell.

Why do I care anyway?!

[Daniel A]

Actually, what I meant was that if Greg's articles were all in high scool papers...

[rockefeller center]

I've published hundreds of articles in about 15 journals altogether. Now I'm a senior projects mgr at a company specializing in HPLC instrumentation and for the first time in my career, after paying dues for a looong time, I'm a supervisor. I can see working where I am until I retire.

I'm working in pharmaceutical research / drug discovery, and in particular focusing on biophysics, biochemistry, single molecule spectroscopy and imaging. I just wonder whether one can find any of your hundreds of references in PubMed or Chemical Abstracts.

[Guest GregM]

I guess I'll just have to believe Greg wrote hundreds of scientific articles in peer reviewed journals and there's no mention of any of them anywhere in the Google galaxy.

It'll be tough after the Mnytime fiasco, but what the hell.

Why do I care anyway?!

You obviously care, or you wouldn't have asked.

One thing that you seem to have misinterpreted from my post is that you say "peer-reviewed journals". I never said that. The overwhelming majority of my articles are not papers and therefore published in trade publications, not scientific publications. There is a mention online (on the CV of an associate professor I worked with back when he was a grad student) of a paper I co-authored in Marine Behavior and Physiology, a peer-reviewed journal. The paper has to do with a peculiar behavior of an intertidal gastropod, Lottia gigantea (I think a google search would bring up the CV). I can get page numbers and vol # and all that if you're truly anal about this. I've also had a few articles published in the JAOAC and JAPhA (not to be confused with APHA) which are also peer-reviewed, but they were news articles, not scientific papers. Aside from these, all my articles are in trade journals.

After I swore off labwork in 1991, I became a journalist. Any idiot knows that journalists don't have papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Trade pubs (at least those I've worked for) don't go back retrospectively to publish old issues online. To give you some clue, during '94-'96, I was working as a staff writer for Internal Medicine News, Family Practice News, Skin and Allergy News, Ob/Gyn News, Clinical Psychiatry News, and Pediatric News, which were all published by IMNG (International Medical News Group, Inc.). I was submitting about 2 articles to each publication per month--let's say roughly 10 articles published a month, on average, for a little more than two years, equals 240 articles. . .plus some I published as a freelancer. . .all in just two of the ~7 years I worked as a journalist. Do the math. I am not saying I was a storied, pulitzer prize winning journalist. . .just a tough staff writer/technical writer who for years was on the horn and on the keypad knocking out article after article, paying my dues and learning a lot about many different fields and industries beyond what you can learn in grad school.

Hundreds of articles is accurate. I can send you the boxes of my clippings if you promise to have them typed up along with the date and volume number and publication in which they appeared--and emailed to me so I can upload and index them. That way, next time some dolt questions me I can just give him a few hundred URLs.

Now let's hear about you, Dmitry. Any malpractice suits yet?

And as for you Daniel A (does the A stand for asshole?), I never wrote for my high school paper. I wasn't one of those types who was gung ho about high school.

Edited August 17, 2003 by GregM

[Guest GregM]

I'm working in pharmaceutical research / drug discovery, and in particular focusing on biophysics, biochemistry, single molecule spectroscopy and imaging. I just wonder whether one can find any of your hundreds of references in PubMed or Chemical Abstracts.

Great. Do you do LC/MS or 2D nano or capillary liquid chromatography for 2D protein separations or MALDI? Or what about detection of amino acids or carbohydrates without requiring derivatization? What do you separate? Nucleic acids? Small molecules? Peptides?

Most of my pharmaceutical-related articles have to do with clinical findings, and target an audience of physicians. Many others are published in Pharmacy Today or Emerging Pharmaceuticals. Only a handful have to do with analytical chemistry problems (some published in JAOAC--but as news items, not papers), and none would be picked up by Chem Abstracts or PubMed.

Anyway, do let me know if you or others at your lab have any interest in applications that I mentioned.

Edited August 17, 2003 by GregM

[rockefeller center]

Do you do LC/MS or 2D nano or capillary liquid chromatography for 2D protein separations or MALDI? Or what about detection of amino acids or carbohydrates without requiring derivatization? What do you separate? Nucleic acids? Small molecules? Peptides?

Most of my pharmaceutical-related articles have to do with clinical findings, and target an audience of physicians. Many others are published in Pharmacy Today or Emerging Pharmaceuticals. Only a handful have to do with analytical chemistry problems (some published in JAOAC--but as news items, not papers), and none would be picked up by Chem Abstracts or PubMed.

Anyway, do let me know if you or others at your lab have any interest in applications that I mentioned.

For our small molecules we certainly do µHPLC-/MS and -MS² for routine decoding; MALDI we use mainly for analytics of biomolecules such as peptides, nucleic acids and proteins (as most labs do); I did also work with nano HPLC, MECK and CE in the past. We also did a bit of carbohydrate analytics based on UV-detection as boric acid complexes. For our purpose, these are mainly analytical methods to check on the quality of our reagents that we then use in our single molecule experiments.

[connoisseur series500]

Seems to me this thread started in an honest fashion allowing people to reveal personal information.

Didn't take long for the flames to start.

Will you people leave Greg alone? For crying out loud. He reveals some personal info and people obviously bearing some kind of animus feel compelled to get his goat. Yes, I am aware that Greg fights back with some invective, but as far as I can discern, he did not start this.

Save the mudslinging for politics. I've personally stayed from politics a bit in order to catch my breath! :rsmile:

Let's allow ourselves to get to know each other in this thread.

[Rooster_Ties]

What Conn500 said.

Edited August 17, 2003 by Rooster_Ties

[A Lark Ascending]

Graduated with a History degree in 1976 and then did a years teacher training.

Got a job teaching history in a mining town in the middle of England; the mining has gone but I'm still in that same school 25 years later! Love the school, love the staff, love the kids...and the promotions came up just right.

In some ways I'm in exactly the position I'd always wanted. Enough responsibility to have some influence over how things go yet not to the point of becoming an administrator. I get to teach history (what I love most) but also get the rewards that come with managing adults.

I lead a faculty of mainly young staff and am supremely lucky to have inventive, positive people who are great to be with.

The only thing I'd change is shifting the school 150 to 200 miles south-west. My heart is very much in the south west of England.

[Christiern]

• Commercial artist
  
• Hotel desk clerk
  
• Record store clerk
  
• Temp
  
• Disc Jockey
  
• Record producer
  
• Writer
  
• Mail room worker
  
• Radio station manager
  
• Continuity director
  
• Proofreader
  
  That's basically it--some details follow
  
  
  
  • Born in Iceland, I began my few school years there, then moved to Forest Hills, NY (1941-44), where—in 2 1/2 years--I learned little more than rudimentary English (their excuse being that we were at war and the male teachers were in the service!). Back to Iceland in ’44, but I had forgotten Icelandic and I was way behind academically. The war ended a year later, and I was sent to Denmark, to be with my grandparents. Unfortunately, I had also forgotten my Danish, so we communicated in English, with a very limited vocabulary.
    
    Due to my language setbacks, it seemed impossible to place me in a Danish school, so I was sent to England, where I attended a boarding school in Canterbury. Here the level of education was much higher than any I had previously encountered, but English boarding school life (remember

Goodbye, Mr. Chips? Was not for me. Back in Denmark after a year, I managed to talk my family out of returning me to Canterbury, so it was decided that I should go to art school (I had long shown an interest in and some talent for drawing)—thus my formal education ended at 15, without having actually reached the level that is normal for that age.

My first job was in the art department of a Copenhagen-based music store that had branches all over the city and the rest of Denmark. The chain sold radios, record playing equipment, records, and musical instruments. I was an apprentice in a department of five artists who designed window displays and posters for the company. I eventually became a full-fledged artist. By that time, the company was carrying the first B&O wire and tape recorders, and I had accidentally come upon Bessie Smith on the Danish radio.

Bessie led the way to my broader appreciation of jazz, and there came a time when I spent all my money on 78s, which I smuggled home, past my mother, who always thought that purchasing a shirt or a pair of socks would have been wiser. In 1952, Karl Knudsen (then working for the Copenhagen Telephone Company) started the Storyville Club, a weekend gathering place for trad-minded young people. It was the first jazz club in Denmark that actually featured live music—everything before that had been for listening to recordings. The club led to Karl’s formation of Storyville Records, which he initiated by releasing 3 pirated 78s that featured, respectively, Ma Rainey, Clarence Williams Blue Five, James P. Johnson.

Storyville was doing well and I still don’t know how it happened, but I suddenly found myself replacing Karl as its president. The club was house in a very large room, appropriately—we thought—by the docks, and I had volunteered to paint murals on every wall, which I did. The theme was New Orleans, and the success of these murals probably had something to do with my becoming the club’s head. In the meantime, Karl pushed on.

He made arrangements to bring Ken Colyer’s new band from London. Colyer had just returned from the U.S., having gone there as a merchant marine and ended up overstaying his welcome—he was jailed in New Orleans, which made him quite the hero in our eyes.

Having become a fan of the Humphrey Lyttleton band, I decided to go to England and record it on my new B&O tape recorder, so I—in my extreme naivïté, I wrote a letter to Humph telling him that I would be coming to London to prepare a program for the Danish radio, and would like to record him and his band.

Of course the radio assignment was not rue, but I received a reply from Lyn Dutton, Humph’s manager (I didn’t know jazz people had managers). It would be ok to do an interview, but union restriction would get in the way of recording the band, “however, we can discuss this further when you get here.” That last part sounded lie an opening, I thought.

To make along story shorter, I sold some of my 78s and bought a 3rd class rail/boat ticket to London, lugged my 65 lbs tape recorder, two reels of tape (I still have them), and a dynamic microphone with one of those heavy floor stands. It’s amazing what young people will do when they have the enthusiasm. Mind you, the recorder, microphone, and stand were installment purchases, far from paid for.

My little lie became truth when I sent the tape to the music department of the Danish radio and was asked to do a program based on them. That led to more radio programs and another career, in a way. When the Colyer band came to play at Storyville, my trusty B&O was again put to good use. I recorded a series of selections that became Storyville’s first original releases, and they are still in the catalog!

Now it was time to go to the source of all this great music, so I looked into immigration. That was not easy in those post-war years. Canada was looking for farmers, so I gave that some consideration, but it was a silly, desperate idea. I found out that the immigration quote was used less by Icelanders than Danes, so—having dual citizenship—I decided to go back to Iceland and apply from there.

It was 1954 and I found a job as a desk clerk on the U.S. Air base. Soon thereafter, however, I was hired by the U.S. Armed Forces Radio and TV Service as an announcer, ostensibly to conduct a program of classical music. It was not long before I was doin a couple of jazz programs, and I even had my very own country music hour.

Two and a half years went by before my papers came through. I arrived in NYC on my 26th birthday, in 1957. As I looked for a job in commercial art, I very quickly found myself without any proof of past experience in that field; I had sent all my samples, photos, letters of recommendation, etc. to anonymous NY Times box numbers, and nothing was returned to me. Starving in New York, I got a job at Doubleday, working behind the record counter as Christmas relief. I lived in a $8-a-week room and it was difficult for me to pay the rent, so I went to the Greyhound bus station on 50th Street with $10 to my name. The ticket agent told me that I could get to Philadelphia for 3 dollars, so I boarded a bus with my little suitcase. In Philly, I found a very clean rooming house where I could stay for $5 a week, and I purchased bread at a Horn & Hardart day-old shop for the remaining two dollars.

Again, long story shorter, within a week, I landed a job as radio producer and writer at WCAU, the local CBS affiliate—I had to pretend that I had been a producer in the old country. They bought my desperate story and, by keeping my eyes and ears open, I handled the job without them ever suspecting that they had been lied to.

A year later, CBS bought WCAU, and the writer’s union came in. The Program Director fired me for not having “lived up to expectations,” which came as a surprise, because he always told me that I deserved a raise. Anyway, when I told Mrs. Burke, the head of the Writer’s Guild East, she said that I should go to work as usual, because they could not fire me to avoid paying me union wages.

I went to work every day, but all my shows were taken from me, so I just sat in my office, writing letters to friends and family, and getting paid for it. That eventually became such a bore that I applied for a job as morning dj at WHAT-FM, which was then a 24-7 jazz station.

From WHAT, whose owner was an obnoxious racist therein lies another story), I went back to New York, where Nat Hentoff arranged for a job interview at Bill Grauer Productions. Bill was a great guy and he was well aware of my situation at WHAT, which was a major outlet for his Riverside Records. I became a producer (and obligatory liner note writer) there, and stayed for a year—leaving largely because of Bill’s partner, Orrin, who seemed to resent my production activities, especially a successful recording trek I made to New Orleans in January of 1961.

Next stop was Prestige Records, where I got along splendidly with my boss, Bob Weinstock, who had Bill’s enthusiasm and ear for the music, but none of Orrin’s peculiar jealousies and insecurities.

My work at these two labels can be seen by going to allmusic.com and entering Chris Albertson in the search spot.

This is far too long, so I will stop now. If anyone wants me to continue, let me know.

[rockefeller center]

If anyone wants me to continue, let me know.

I enjoyed reading your story so far. Please continue. Thank you.

[connoisseur series500]

Thanks for the info, Dmitry. Nice to hear your personal side.

Great story so far, Chris!

Now what we need is some bigtime gossip about some of the musicians and producers you worked with!

[Eric]

Lessee ...

Graduated in 1984 from the U of Kansas with a degree in accounting. Worked for Ernst & Young for 11 years, then 5 with a large investment manager in KC, and am currently CFO for a small public company here in KC.

I lived all over the US as a kid and travel quite a bit today - mostly to NY, SF and Boston. Thanks to the job(s), I have hit most of the neat jazz clubs and record stores in the US. The job has also taken me to London, Paris and India, so no complaints there either.

Picked up the jazz jones from a jazz appreciation class at KU (aside from punk rock, I was pretty sick of rock in the early 80s). The instructor, Dick Wright, was something of a local legend on the jazz scene. One of our assignments was to go see Phil Woods in KC (Tom Harrell had just joined) ... and after that I was hooked.

Eric

[Christiern]

Since a couple of you have said you wanted more—here is the rest of my capsule bio :

• When I left Prestige Records, Riverside was going belly-up, but I decided to start my own production co. I did four albums, one each by Howard McGhee, Cliff Jackson, Bud Freeman, and Elmer Snowden. Oddly enough, Orrin wanted to release them—we made a deal, but the label was going under, so I took my tapes elsewhere. They ended up on Fontana and, subsequently, Black Lion. I lost money on the deal—never was business minded. In the meantime, I had taken an apartment with a fellow Dane and jazz enthusiast, Timme Rosenkrantz. We rented a basement apartment from Billie Holiday’s widower, Louis McKay, a real crook who cheated us royally on the rent (that’s another story).
  
  Disenchanted with the record business, I decided to look for a job with no heavy responsibilities, one that would give me time to think. I found it at Current magazine, a highly literary subscription-only monthly publication that each month gave its subscribers a choice of three other publications from a list of 10 or 12. My job was to fill those orders—I was working in the mail room. When I applied, they wanted a reference, so I gave them Nat Hentoff’s name, because he had told me to feel free to do so. I noticed an odd look on the interviewer’s face when I mentioned Nat—it turned out that he was a major contributor to Current. After speaking to him, they expressed some bewilderment, but said I could have the job if I accepted an editorial position that would be vacant a couple of months later. That’s not what I wanted, but I agreed. To put the chronology into perspective, this was the week of the Cuban crisis.
  
  Just before the editorial position was going to be available, I was offered a job at WNEW as continuity Director. I accepted that and started volunteering at WBAI, Pacifica’s NYC station. I won’t go into the WBAI story here, but I ended up being appointed general manager. It was a taxing but highly interesting job. Taxing, because money was always low and 25 employees had to be paid, interesting, because it meant working with the likes of Ayn Rand, Gunther Schuller, David Amram, Malcolm X, Andrew Sarris, and just about everyone who was prominent in the Civil Rights movement. My music director was John Corigliano, and Yoko Ono was our music dept. file clerk.
  
  Around 1966, I think it was, I decided to leave WBAI and accept a job with the BBC, which entailed spending every other month in NY and London. At the BBC I worked with everyone from the Beatles and Marty Feldman to Gustav Holst’s widow—my job was to package and repackage BBC programs for the U.S. market. It was my last salaried job—I left to go freelance in 1967, and I’m still at it. In 1969, I began hounding Columbia Records with a suggestion that they release the complete Bessie Smith—took 2 years to convince them. In the meantime, I was writing for down beat and working as a proof reader at Forbes magazine. The result garnered me several awards, including 2 Grammys, and a book deal. In 1971, as I worked on the Bessie book, I hosted and co-produced a weekly half-hour TV show, The Jazz Set, which was picked up by PBS and some of which (Mingus, Bill Evans, for ex.) will be released on DVD. I also started writing for Saturday Review, and became a contributing editor to Stereo Review, a side trip that lasted 28 years.
  
  I bought my first computer in 1979 and it began replacing my typewriter a a couple of years later. When the Macintosh grew up, I saw an opportunity to reach back to my old profession, so I got involved in computer graphics. At first, I saw it only as something fun to do (Macs can be so inspiring ), but it actually became a nice source of income.
  
  That’s about it for me. I have occupied the same apartment for 40 years, I still write, and my Macintoshes rarely rest.
  

[brownie]

I am currently finishing a long and mostly happy career with an international news

agency. Will be reaching retirement age and will have completed a 40-year stint

there at the end of 2004.

As the person in charge of photo operations in France and North Africa, I have

been on all kinds of assignments around the world. A sample listing would

include Olympic Games (most of them since the 1972 Munich Olympics), world soccer/cycling/track and field championships, Pope trips, riots, revolutions, wars,

airplane hijackings, conferences, royal crownings, weddings, funerals (from

de Gaulle to Diana with people like Franco, Grace, Sartre and many others in between),

mine disasters, floods, film festivals. Everything.

And I loved doing this (still do) even the unglamorous ones which usually

are the most difficult.

Was involved in jazz activities before I started that career but had to curtail

the jazz bit when I got more and more responsibilities with my job.

Planning on busy retirement years with lots of jazz to keep the spirit alive.

[Rooster_Ties]

How about our very own "Fist of Doom"???

Hey Use3D, what's your story??

[Free For All]

The instructor, Dick Wright, was something of a local legend on the jazz scene. 

Dick Wright was absolutely an awsome person. He was incredibly knowledgeable about the music as well as being one of the kindest and most generous people I've ever known. If you mentioned that you liked a certain player the next thing you knew he'd have made up a compilation tape for you. He had a HUGE music collection (did he leave that to KU, Eric?) and seemed to have it all indexed in his head. He will be sorely missed.

[Rooster_Ties]

How about our very own "Fist of Doom"???

Hey Use3D, what's your story??

Well??

[chris olivarez]

When I was in junior college I started off by majoring in journalism but I decided that it wasn't for me. I switched majors to broadcasting and that has turned out to be my calling. I dig what I do but I wondered what would have happened if I would have been a plumber or lawyer or something that payed more money?

[Peter Johnson]

I wondered what would have happened if I would have been a plumber or lawyer or something that payed more money?

Well, Chris, if you had been a lawyer...well, a litigator, you would spend many nights in the office, eating Chinese food at your desk, calling your colleagues to complain about your secretary, and fretting about deadlines!

Well, I'm KIND OF kidding. That's part of it. But I count myself in with what seems to be about 10% of lawyers who really enjoy what they do. I actually do estate litigation--so while there's always a winner and a loser, I (and my firm) frequently have the opportunity to really help people when they're in a time of need; we see it all the time, when someone's loved one has passed, all they want to do is wrap up the estate, but they have a greedy relative/employee/friend who wants to hijack the proceedings. It ain't cool, but there are solutions. It's a hell of a lot better than arguing on the phone all day, like some of my commercial litigator friends tell me they do!

That being said, I've always wondered (seriously!) what my life would have been like if I'd gone into broadcasting! Something I've been curious about forever...used to think maybe I could get a summer job as a DJ at my favorite radio station in Portland, OR--never panned out. Still wondering!!!

[jacman]

man, my history is kinda dull. joined the Air Force at 17, and spent 4 years as a Corpsman stationed in the SF bay area. went to college hoping to get an art degree, but discovered that as good as i was, i wasn't that good.

so, i went to nursing school. if i remember correctly, there were only 4 other men in a class of 50 . been doing that in a multitude of positions since.

now i'm a mostly stay at home dad (working part-time in home health), with a 4 year old daughter, and a 10 year old step-daughter. i started doing art again, and have taken up drums and didgeridoo as a hobby.

in between all this i've been:

janitor

off-set printing pressman

photolab instructor

window washer

dishwasher

file clerk

i tried being a drunken lout, but it didn't pan out.