James+Straus

**Introduction:**
My name is James and I'm a computer consultant specializing in hardware and software troubleshooting, repair, and maintenance. I have worked for 5 years as an IT specialist and computer administrator for a small online business and have done freelance consultation and technical repair work with both Apples and PCs for 15 years. I'm hoping to contribute to the HCLE wiki by cleaning up pages and getting the layout working as desired as well as working with OCR issues with PDF files and helping to maintain the catalog. I am always appreciative for the opportunity to work and am thankful to be here.

**Profile:**
Education: Candidate for Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Candidate for Bachelors of Arts in English with minor in History from Northeastern University.

Experience: Spent the last five years working for AllGoodConnect LLC as an online sales specialist and computer administrator. Worked for Northeastern University's Disability department scanning books with an OCR program for blind and otherwise visually disabled student to listen to. Worked as a computer admin for the Northeastern Computer Lab as well as worked for Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the POEM lab doing AutoCAD work. I have many more jobs but have posted here only these related to my technical skill and experience. I also have personal experience with HTML, CSS, and a few coding languages though I would not call myself a coder as I focus on hardware more so.

**Communication:**
JJS20171109: Working on finding missing PDFs, 2530 is corrupt and needs replacing though I couldn't find it. Adding low res thumbnails to listings as well as normal res thumbnails as Anna requested.

LL20170909: I hear you have a new job. Congratulations! I need you to update your Staff Hours table so I can pay you anything I owe for recent work in August and Sept. Have you uploaded the magazine files you were working on? Let's get that done before you get too involved in other projects. Also, please leave a note here or email me to let me know whether you will have any time for this project going forward. Way to go, James. I'm proud of you.

JJS20170814: Continuing the work on Magazines, trying to get everything linked from their source and via the right thumbs folder for thumbnails. Couldn't find a pdf source anywhere for 1080, almost none of the Dr. Dobbs stuff online. Can you scan in 1080 at home by any chance if you have it? I could make a pdf out of the scans if so and upload it to the server. Also cannot find The Computing Teacher anywhere online at all. Only a few things that cite it as a source but not any digitized magazines at all. Was looking in reference to 1084.

JJS20170814: Working on correcting url for thumbnails into the thumbs directory as well as finding missing files from the collections catalogue online, fixing their OCR layers, creating thumbnails, and uploading it to the proper directory and updating the maintance page urls for pdfs and thumbnails finally.

JJS20170811: Finished making thumbnails out of all the PDFs in repository. Need to start linked missing thumbnails to their catalogue pages like we talked about and have them in a thumbs folder like you wanted next. I looked into PHP on the same a little as well and started a basic code academy course on it that I am doing. I also found a guide for phpmyadmin which I plan to tackle after I have a better understanding of the language. Should I bill you for time I spend on learning PHP? No right? Let me know.

JJS20170809: Corrupt PDFs in repository are - 1546, 2530, 2579, 2584, 2601, 2610, 2035. Finishing up jpeg thumbnails for repository.

JJS20170731: I have the PDF stuff all figured out on the virtual museum. I'm going through the 200+ pdfs and fixing the OCR layer in all of them, it will be done by tonight. I then plan to go through the virtual museum look for incomplete files and find their replacements as you mentioned some PDFs are just thumbnails when they should be more. I also understand that there files we have that are not linked to the virtual museum which I have to take a look at too. Anyways, just crunching through these PDFs for now and will upload them all to replace the bad PDFs when I'm done.

JJS20170726: I think I fixed the navigation sidebar like you asked and combined the pages into the main staff page under subsections. I will cross link those sections to their respective pages as well though its all cleaned up and on the staff page. Going to work on the catalogue now though like you asked as thats priority. I hope you're well and Happy Birthday by the way!

LL20170726: On navigation - The left hand nav column should have only links to section landing pages. Volunteers, Interns and Contractors should be subsections you get to from the Staff Section Page which doesn't exist yet so you can design and implement, then link the subsections to it. Will get back to you soon. Note that money should be in your bank this afternoon and I added a running "on account" column to your Staff Hours so you can anticipate when to submit another invoice (you're a contractor so that's how you'll get paid in the future). There is usually about 15 days between the time I receive your invoice and when you receive your check. Better plan for that.

JJS20170725: I managed to get the twitter and linkedin widgets up and looking nice on the navigation sidebar. I embedded your youtube link into your About the Project page which looks much nicer. Removed the social media widgets off the bottom of the page like I suggested as it looks much better with just the tag cloud there. I can undo this at your desire of course if you prefer it the other way obviously though it seems more streamlined this way. I made the oversized image fit on the bottom of the Planning page with a link directly to the image so people can zoom in on it in a new tab rather than wrecking your page layout by having it extend to the right very far. Working on finding irregular spacing and alignment issues on the main pages linked in the Navigation sidebar so everything looks clean and professional.

JJS20170724: So i added links to the staff and interns page as you noted them to be separate job types I saw. I worked on debugging your social media widgets as they seemed a bit messy and cleaning up the navigation sidebar. Google Plus no longer is in use for the time being so it didn't seem like the widget worked, and the digg widget hates showing up no matter how I adjust the html oddly. We can definitely get more social media widgets on here like twitter and instagram and what not but I think since you have the widgets on the navigation sidebar maybe you don't need the widgets also on the homepage that you have as the static front page when the site loads. Can you tell me off the top of your head what else the site needs worth with besides basic editing and organization? Any pages you need linked together or cleaned up? I'm going to keep looking around for stuff as well that needs fixing as I work on the wiki.

====LL20170724: Really nice job on this page, James. Go get 'em! I came across a few typos which I just went ahead and corrected. Please feel free to do that for me when you're going over my stuff. I didn't change anything substantive. Let me share some thoughts and reaction that might make this page even stronger.==== 1. I added a header for the page with your name. Please post your picture if you are so moved. The web is a visual medium and the more illustrations the more clicks! 2. Many of our pages have the Table of Contents Widget. To use it effectively you have to make sure your headings are at the right level. Try it here so you can learn it for other pages. Right now all your paragraph headings are level 4. The TOC widget works better if you also use 2 and 3. Let me know if you need more support with this. 3. When we talked I understood that you had an objective of getting a full-time job with benefits. It's fine to put that here if you want readers to know you're available. 4. Please note that wikispaces will be down for maintenance on July 29 and 30 so you'll have to work on something else during that interval. 5. Anna, our catalog programmer is working on the catalog today so it may be down for a while. I'll introduce you two so you can coordinate your efforts. I need to get the catalog login to you. 6. Your #4, as you figure out how to do the pdf ocr please document the process. We will need to teach it to others.

JJS20170724: Creating my personal page first like you request and getting myself fully familiar with the wikispaces interface and system.

** Goals and Objectives: **
-Update wiki and add to wiki. -Update and repair links in the catalog -Restore missing OCR layer to PDFs if possible -Familiarize myself with salesforce platform -Gain experience in the IT field through persistent work.

** Specific Tasks ** :
1. Create personal staff page for myself. 2. Familarize self with wikispaces interface and system. 3. Get a staff page up and linked in the menu on the left. 4. Check catalogue for missing links and for pdfs that are are missing the OCR layer.

__Staff Hours__
and debugging issues with them on different pages. || On going || 07/26/17 || 432.5 || widget after some code difficulty, going through pages for layout and alignment issues, fixed oversized image on bottom of planning page with instructions zooming in. ||  || 07/26/17 || 402.5 || PDFs, fixing their OCR, making thumbnails, uploading and adding address links in the Catalogue Maintenance upage like you mention before || On going || 07/26/17 || 170 ||
 * = **Date** ||= **Hours** ||= **Assignment** ||= **Accomplished** || **Date Paid** || **On Accoun**t ||
 * 07/23/2017 || 1.5 || Orientation Conversation || Finished || 07/26/17 || 477.5 ||
 * 07/24/2017 || 1 || Setup my staff page || Finished || 07/26/17 || 462.5 ||
 * " || 2 || Working on navigation sidebar, adding links,and cleaning up social media widgets
 * 07/24/2017 || 2 || Embeded youtube link into page on About the Project, added linkedin and twitter
 * 07/25/2017 || 1.5 || Integrated Volunteer and Intern pages into Staff page and cleaned up formatting. || Finished || 07/26/17 || 380 ||
 * 07/31/2017 || 5 || Took all the PDFs from repository on server, fixed OCR layer in them all and replaced. || Finished || 07/26/17 || 305 ||
 * 08/04/2017 || 2 || Identified broken/corrupt PDFs and creating thumbnails for whats missing. || On going || 07/26/17 || 275 ||
 * 08/11/2017 || 3 || Finished making thumbnail jpegs out of all PDFs || Finished || 07/26/17 || 230 ||
 * 08/14/2017 || 4 || Moving fixing thumbnail links in the catalog to the thumbs directory and finding missing
 * 08/19/2017 || 3 || Fixing links in magazines to get PDF from archive, also uploading thumbnails, PDFs || On going || 07/26/17 || 125 ||
 * 08/21/2017 || 3 || Continuing to fix missing PDFs and thumbnails in the magazines category || On going || 07/26/17 || 80 ||
 * 08/28/2017 || 2 || Same as above. || On going || 07/26/17 || 50 ||
 * 08/30/2017 || 2 || Same as above, 1080 needs to be scanned in! || On going || 07/26/17 || 20 ||
 * 11/06/2017 || 2 || Same, but also adding small res thumbnails, updating listings with PDFs & Jpegs || On going || 07/26/17 || -10 Owed ||
 * 11/09/2017 || 2 || Same as above, 2530 is corrupt and not working || On going || - || -40 ||
 * 11/15/2017 || 2 || Same as above, but 1032 isn't accepting the updated thumbnails, sent email. || On going || - || -70 ||
 * 11/17/2017 || 2 || Same as above, have all the small thumbnails done up to Magazines now || On going || - || -100 ||
 * 11/21/2017 || 3 || Same as above, catalogue page offline in the evening randomly || On going || - || -145 ||