Name: Richard Ericksen
Age: 33 (6/7/1975)
Goal: To join a team creating or maintaining an existing MMO. My dream position would be designing raid encounters or boss fight mechanics, but I'd be just as happy writing quest or NPC text, organizing and cataloging art assets, scrubbing toilets, or fetching coffee.
My employment history does not reflect working on games, but everyone has to start somewhere, and hopefully the variety below can be viewed in a positive 'he's able to handle anything' light, rather than a negative 'he's never shipped a AAA title' light.
Employment History:
English Instructor
Asakuchi City Board of Education, Okayama, Japan
2/2005 - 3/2009
4,100,000円/year ($35,000/year, roughly)
Duties: Elementary School English Instruction for kindergarten through sixth grade. This was a position I took on a bit of a whim after working production/IT for 6 years, and visiting Japan on vacation after my office closed down. I really didn't expect it to keep going the way it did, but I got wrapped up in it. I organized the district's teaching materials and helped to unify the district's English Program across seven elementary schools. I was even on the Japanese national news (NHK) a few times.
Before coming to Japan, the district's separate schools had teachers in the rotation teaching 'whatever felt right that month', but I helped to organize this system into a standard system. For example, the second graders are taught Vehicles in February, consisting of these exact 12 vehicles, along with these exact flashcards, using these specific target sentences, and these specific games and songs. This allowed the foreign teachers to rotate around to different schools and pick up where the person before us left off.
IT Director
Document Solutions, Inc
1611 Telegraph Ave #1010 Oakland, CA 94610
4,100,000円/year ($35,000/year, roughly)
Duties: Elementary School English Instruction for kindergarten through sixth grade. This was a position I took on a bit of a whim after working production/IT for 6 years, and visiting Japan on vacation after my office closed down. I really didn't expect it to keep going the way it did, but I got wrapped up in it. I organized the district's teaching materials and helped to unify the district's English Program across seven elementary schools. I was even on the Japanese national news (NHK) a few times.
Before coming to Japan, the district's separate schools had teachers in the rotation teaching 'whatever felt right that month', but I helped to organize this system into a standard system. For example, the second graders are taught Vehicles in February, consisting of these exact 12 vehicles, along with these exact flashcards, using these specific target sentences, and these specific games and songs. This allowed the foreign teachers to rotate around to different schools and pick up where the person before us left off.
IT Director
Document Solutions, Inc
1611 Telegraph Ave #1010 Oakland, CA 94610
12/2001 - 6/2004
$35,000/year
Duties: The title itself sounds more intimidating than it was, but I don't discount the work I did there. We were a PDF conversion company that would take filing cabinets full of paper and scan it to become full text searchable PDFs. We had around 30 workstations ranging from NT4.0 to Windows XP, with two Macs thrown in for good measure. We used Novell 5.0 with a Groupwise 5.5 mail system. Linux Samba shares provided file services, as well as various Windows Servers. All of it was strung together with a few Cisco 2900XLs and CAT5 running through the ceiling panels.
The previous head of IT that was with the company from the beginning took me under his wing before finally leaving the company for bigger and better things. I took over maintaining the hardware on the floor, researching and implementing new purchases, and getting an actual backup system fully implemented, as well as a limited VPN that in the end saw very little use, but allowed a few key staff to work from home. Jon had built the system piece by piece, and it wasn't horribly organized, so I did my best to document the systems we had, what they did, and how all the pieces fit together. Our work floor needed to have many different setups to make sure all of our clients (from the Federal Government and United Nations, to Allen Press and Adobe themselves) could view our products with no hassle.
Production Staff
Document Solutions, Inc
$35,000/year
Duties: The title itself sounds more intimidating than it was, but I don't discount the work I did there. We were a PDF conversion company that would take filing cabinets full of paper and scan it to become full text searchable PDFs. We had around 30 workstations ranging from NT4.0 to Windows XP, with two Macs thrown in for good measure. We used Novell 5.0 with a Groupwise 5.5 mail system. Linux Samba shares provided file services, as well as various Windows Servers. All of it was strung together with a few Cisco 2900XLs and CAT5 running through the ceiling panels.
The previous head of IT that was with the company from the beginning took me under his wing before finally leaving the company for bigger and better things. I took over maintaining the hardware on the floor, researching and implementing new purchases, and getting an actual backup system fully implemented, as well as a limited VPN that in the end saw very little use, but allowed a few key staff to work from home. Jon had built the system piece by piece, and it wasn't horribly organized, so I did my best to document the systems we had, what they did, and how all the pieces fit together. Our work floor needed to have many different setups to make sure all of our clients (from the Federal Government and United Nations, to Allen Press and Adobe themselves) could view our products with no hassle.
Production Staff
Document Solutions, Inc
1/1998 - 12/2001
$30,000 year
Duties: As production staff (which I was initially hired at DSI as), I was scanning documents in bulk, doing various cleanups of the scans in proprietary software, and proofreading what the OCR engine thought it saw. This wasn't very thrilling work, and I introduced various time saving techniques to the management to show how simple tasks could be automated using Photoshop Actions, or using more creative means to automate simple tasks. To this day, there is no keyboard shortcut for "Brightness / Contrast" in Photoshop, and it was a common slider we were fiddling with for certain greyscale scans. I suggested we buy Belkin Nostromos for the production staff, and taught everyone how to make simple key sequence macros (Alt, I, down, down, left, enter, etc) that would only require one button press, no mouse clicks, and could play out in a fraction of a second.
I was eventually promoted out of production, and oversaw more advanced projects that I would handle myself (conversion of full color brochures for more detail oriented projects), or more of the simple projects with a staff working under me.
I eventually took over the IT department, as mentioned above.
Education:
I attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco for two years, where I learned to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and various 3d modeling apps (Softimage, actually, but the principles apply anywhere, and the 3d mockups on this site are using 3dsmax). I took this knowledge and got a job at DSI using the computer (although in a pretty limited sense, at first). I also enrolled in basic figure drawing, color theory, and analysis of form classes, but art school was too expensive to complete.
Misc Notes:
My computer knowledge all comes first hand. I've been using computers since my first 8086 lord knows how many years ago. I've played games all my life, with my first console being the Atari 2600. I currently own an Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, Wii, two DS Lites, a PSP, a laptop and my main rig. I also have an old dell with no monitor or keyboard that sits under my desk and acts as a web server with PHP and mySQL where I can test out Drupal installs for guild websites, or whatever little project needs a little box sitting on the net (hosting guild WWS parses, DKP sites, whatever).
I love gaming, and want it to be more than a hobby. People talk about loving their job, and while I've enjoyed certain aspects of each job I've held, I've never sat down, tried to decide "what do I REALLY want to do for the rest of my life?" and gone after it. This website is that last sentence realized.
I want to work on MMOs. If that requires starting at the bottom of the totem pole somewhere until I can prove myself to those around me that I'm a valuable addition to the company then so be it.
My other hobbies include photography, travel, maintaining my blog, and generally just spending time with my wife and newborn son.
References:
$30,000 year
Duties: As production staff (which I was initially hired at DSI as), I was scanning documents in bulk, doing various cleanups of the scans in proprietary software, and proofreading what the OCR engine thought it saw. This wasn't very thrilling work, and I introduced various time saving techniques to the management to show how simple tasks could be automated using Photoshop Actions, or using more creative means to automate simple tasks. To this day, there is no keyboard shortcut for "Brightness / Contrast" in Photoshop, and it was a common slider we were fiddling with for certain greyscale scans. I suggested we buy Belkin Nostromos for the production staff, and taught everyone how to make simple key sequence macros (Alt, I, down, down, left, enter, etc) that would only require one button press, no mouse clicks, and could play out in a fraction of a second.
I was eventually promoted out of production, and oversaw more advanced projects that I would handle myself (conversion of full color brochures for more detail oriented projects), or more of the simple projects with a staff working under me.
I eventually took over the IT department, as mentioned above.
Education:
I attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco for two years, where I learned to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and various 3d modeling apps (Softimage, actually, but the principles apply anywhere, and the 3d mockups on this site are using 3dsmax). I took this knowledge and got a job at DSI using the computer (although in a pretty limited sense, at first). I also enrolled in basic figure drawing, color theory, and analysis of form classes, but art school was too expensive to complete.
Misc Notes:
My computer knowledge all comes first hand. I've been using computers since my first 8086 lord knows how many years ago. I've played games all my life, with my first console being the Atari 2600. I currently own an Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, Wii, two DS Lites, a PSP, a laptop and my main rig. I also have an old dell with no monitor or keyboard that sits under my desk and acts as a web server with PHP and mySQL where I can test out Drupal installs for guild websites, or whatever little project needs a little box sitting on the net (hosting guild WWS parses, DKP sites, whatever).
I love gaming, and want it to be more than a hobby. People talk about loving their job, and while I've enjoyed certain aspects of each job I've held, I've never sat down, tried to decide "what do I REALLY want to do for the rest of my life?" and gone after it. This website is that last sentence realized.
I want to work on MMOs. If that requires starting at the bottom of the totem pole somewhere until I can prove myself to those around me that I'm a valuable addition to the company then so be it.
My other hobbies include photography, travel, maintaining my blog, and generally just spending time with my wife and newborn son.
References:
Duff Johnson
Document Solutions, Inc (CEO)
Document Solutions, Inc (CEO)
duff@document-solutions.com
(617) 283-4226
CEO of Document Solutions, but intimately involved in day to day operations, as well
(617) 283-4226
CEO of Document Solutions, but intimately involved in day to day operations, as well
Jeanne Millet Petty
Document Solutions, Inc (Production Manager)
Document Solutions, Inc (Production Manager)
Kevin Cook
NetDevil (UI design)
kevinscook@gmail.com
(303) 885-9277
Collaborated on a previous MMO-themed web endeavor at NotAddicted.com
Okuhara Takako
Asakuchi City Board of Education, Okayma JP
takako_okuhara@city.asakuchi.lg.jp
Probably most comfortable answering questions in Japanese, if possible ;)
NetDevil (UI design)
kevinscook@gmail.com
(303) 885-9277
Collaborated on a previous MMO-themed web endeavor at NotAddicted.com
Okuhara Takako
Asakuchi City Board of Education, Okayma JP
takako_okuhara@city.asakuchi.lg.jp
Probably most comfortable answering questions in Japanese, if possible ;)
