Steve Savitzky <steve @ theStarport.org>
Steve Savitzky	also known as	``The MandelBear''
		(a vaguely ursine and infinitely fuzzy object), in some text-based virtual realities
Lives in a house called Grand Central Starport by its inhabitants.

(fanish biography here) (collected works here)

Steve is a hacker/songwriter, having learned both hacking and folksinging in the 1960's; he discovered organized fandom and filkdom (i.e. was dragged to his first con) in 1978 or so, and wrote his first ``real'' filksong shortly thereafter. About half of his recorded songs are about computers; some, like The World Inside the Crystal, are even serious. He has published a CD, Coffee, Computers, and Song!, and all of his lyrics and writings are on the web at steve.savitzky.net/

In his professional life as a computer scientist (a glorified term for ``middle-aged hacker''), he is currently interested in such minor arcana as web publishing, lightweight content-management systems, web-based communities, macro-based HTML formatting engines, peer-to-peer filesharing, and RESTful web service APIs. In the recent past he was the principal architect of the PIA, an open-source, web-based document processing engine that incorporates a complete scripting language with XML syntax. He is a strong proponent of open-source software, and a heavy Linux user. His latest mad project is PenguinSong.net, a web-based co-op for sharing music. The website uses a PIA spinoff called &.

One of his web pages, Interesting Places for Kids, was listed in the April 25, 1995 issue of PC Magazine as part of A Guided Tour of 100 Hot Sites, and could be considered one of the earliest examples of a "web log", though of course the term wasn't in use at the time.

One of the websites at this location, the Starport in CyberSpace, is intended to serve science fiction fandom and fannish businesses. Contact <steve @ theStarport.org> if you want me to host a fanzine. Xenofilkia is already here.

Public-Access Documents

• Interesting Places.to Browse on the Web (Contributions always welcome.)
  Also points to the following separate lists:
  • Interesting Places for Kids (reasonably comprehensive)
  • Interesting Places for Parents
  • Interesting Places for Music (with an emphasis on Filk)
• Other Documents:
  • Some notes on writing for the Web
  • Notes, Advice, and Warnings for Kids on the Web
  • ... (and others).

About Steve Savitzky

Names:

• Stephen Robert Savitzky <steve @ theStarport.org>
• ``The MandelBear'' in several virtual places
• <steve @ theStarport.org> at home.
• Stephen of Northfield in the SCA.

Titles:

• Chief Software Scientist at Ricoh Innovations

Education:

• BA in Mathematics from Carleton College, 1969
• MS in Computer Science from Stanford, 1971

Research interests:

• XML and web-based document processing, as embodied in the PIA, an open-source, web-based document processing engine that incorporates a complete scripting language with XML syntax available for download from RiSource.org.
• Web publishing, especially as it affects the software and music industries.
• Object-oriented programming (since hanging around Xerox PARC in the early 1970's). (see, for example, the comp.object FAQ)
• Hypertext: (see Some notes on writing for the Web, and of course Xanadu and As We May Think).

• Science fiction, and especially the related topics
  • Filk music (the folk music of the future) (see Filk). This intersects with the next item; e.g. me singing Someplace in the Net in alt.callahans.
  • Virtual Places (e.g. such newsgroups as alt.callahans (info here) and alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst.) I'm known in those parts as the Mandelbear.
• Free Software (see Sources of Free Software)
• Kids and the Net (see Interesting Places for Kids).