My day job: currently I work as a consultant doing technical writing, quality assurance, user support, system adminstration, and some design work for custom FileMaker database solutions. As you can tell from that list, I work in all aspects of software development; I've also done project management, user interface design, and even programming. Most of my experience is on Macs and iOS devices, although I have some Windows experience. I'm very detail oriented and capable of keeping track of all aspects of a project. Having both a liberal arts and a technical background, I'm good at designing and explaining software so it makes sense to non-technical end users, while also understanding the technical issues that inform software design and programming.
In my other life: I'm a big fan of Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip. I maintain the Peanuts Animation & Video List, a page with comprehensive information about all of those great animated specials. I also co-host FiveCentsPlease.org, a Peanuts information and history website, and the associated FiveCentsPlease Blog . I was interviewed as a "Peanuts historian" for the Warner Home Video DVD and Blu-ray releases of several Peanuts holiday specials, and also contributed a couple of chapters about the Peanuts TV shows to 50 Years of Happiness: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, which is now in its third printing and is available from the Charles M. Schulz Museum.
I enjoy traveling and taking photographs of the places I visit, although my photography webpage is extremely out of date.
From 2004-mid 2011, I worked for Fetch Softworks, makers of the Macintosh file transfer program Fetch. I was a project manager, user interface designer, technical writer, and website, QA and support manager. (It was a small company, so I got to wear lots of hats!)
From 1997-early 2004, I worked as a Macintosh software designer at MIT. I spent most of that time on the team developing Kerberos for Macintosh for Mac OS X. We worked closely with Apple to bring the Kerberos authentication system to Mac OS X, and our work was included with Mac OS X from Mac OS X 10.1 through at least Mac OS X 10.6. My contributions to Kerberos for Macintosh were the Kerberos GUI management application, installers, and documentation.
Moving further back in time, I received a Master's of Education with a concentration in Technology In Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education; I was also a Macintosh guru for faculty and the student labs at the Sloan School of Management, and developed courseware to teach computer graphics and 3-D modeling to non-computer science students at Williams College. Not coincidentally I was an undergraduate at Williams, where I graduated with a mathematics degree (as well as concentrations in fiction writing and computer science).
In addition to Peanuts as mentioned above, movie soundtracks, the Muppets, and L. Frank Baum's Oz series all hold special places in my heart (and large chunks of my shelf space).
Comments, questions, feedback, etc: e-mail me at smcguire at scottmcguire dot com.