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Linda spent the first ten years of her life in New Castle, a small town in western Pennsylvania. One of her favorite memories of that place and those years was the Amish farmer in his horse drawn buggy delivering eggs to the houses in her neighborhood. From there she moved with her family to Kings Park on the North Shore of Long Island (pronounced “LohhngGuyland”). The culture shock was tremendous but exciting. After graduating from Grove City College in western PA, Linda received a post baccalaureate certificate in Information Systems from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she met her husband, John.
For the next 10 years, Linda worked in various capacities for the Christian Children’s Fund, whose headquarters is in Richmond. She was part of a two-person writing team that documented all manual and automated systems in the headquarters of the international child sponsorship organization. Her most memorable job was converting the field offices’ manual data systems to an organization-wide automated system. She did everything from develop the system architecture and database design to programming and on-site installation and training. This task took her to field offices in developing nations for month-long stretches to install the system and train the employees. Part of the adventure of the job was getting to meet some of those beautiful children. Part of the challenge of the job was ensuring that there would be some form of power to run those computers — because even though you were working in the capital city, you couldn’t always count on a steady supply of electricity. Eventually, she left to start her own child sponsorship program; namely, her kids.
When she reentered the world of paid work, she returned to technical writing as the lone Tech Writer for a Richmond-based Dolby Laboratories company called Cinea. Her work there included writing installation and user manuals for Cinea’s product line of digitally secure video playback devices. These devises are primarily used by motion picture studios to watermark and encrypt valuable digital content, such as dailies, and screeners for the Academy Awards.
Linda is new to the James River Chapter and to the STC. She’s delighted to be part of an organization dedicated to technical communication.
