microsoft links

Microsoft, the world leader in computer software technology, has three graduates of the College in key positions. A fourth left in 1998 for a major career change.

	Shey and Leann Scarborough Lawrence

Shey Lawrence, ADV 1991, MA 1996, is a software test lead in the Windows Networking Division. He heads a group of testers who ensure the quality of Micosoft diagnostic tools. He was recently involved with testing of the new Windows Millennium and WindowsXP operating systems.

Leann Scarborough Lawrence, MA 1997, is beginning her second year at Microsoft as a technical recruiter, where she enlists possible candidates for testing and development positions. Earlier she spent two years teaching high school literature classes at the American School in Quito, Ecuador.

John SanGiovanni, ADV 1994, is an evangelist—a technical evangelist, that is. Since 1999 he has been spreading the word of mobile computing and wireless technologies worldwide. He delivers large-format events on the future of mobile computing, research funding and discovery at academic research labs and manages a team exploring next-generation mobile phone technologies.

	John SanGiovanni

Last year he was featured in The Wall Street Journal for his research efforts with mobile computing in education. He has covered topics such as “The Campus of Tomorrow,” “The Death of Media” and “Microsoft Mobile Futures.”

“This is a dream job, said SanGiovanni. “It’s been an incredible opportunity to travel, meet amazing people and help build technologies that will power tomorrow’s wireless future.”

In 1998, Eric Artzt, PR 1986, realized that he needed to make a change. After eight years as a technical writer and program manager at Microsoft, he decided to open his own martial arts studio. Now he and his wife, Maggie, instruct about 75 students, ranging from children to adults. Eric teaches the Cuong Nhu style (developed at UF) and has completed two CD-ROMs that incorporate digital video, still images and technique descriptions for a complete guide to the curriculum.

They live in Seattle with their two children—Catherine, 13, and Kyle, 11.

lucky numbers

	Lou Brancaccio on national TV

Ponder this stranger than fiction excerpt from the July 8, 2000 column in the Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian by Lou Brancaccio, JM 1975, managing editor (and now editor) of the 52,000-circulation daily newspaper just outside Portland, Ore.:

“What would happen if, crazy as it might sound, a newspaper published the correct numbers of a lottery…before the numbers were drawn?

Expect a visit. From the lottery law.

This story begins a few days ago on Wednesday when a Vancouver resident called Oregon Lottery officials. He was reading The Columbian and noticed something startling. The winning numbers appeared in our paper before they were drawn.

So, David Hooper, public affairs manager of the Oregon Lottery, placed a call to The Columbian…

The Columbian’s computers crashed on Wednesday and we had to scramble to re-create a news page that had been lost. It happened to be the page that had the lottery results. A copy editor was assigned to go back and get the Oregon Lottery numbers off the news wires.

We were pushing deadline and he had to be quick. He spotted the Pick 4 numbers.

Problem was, he grabbed the Virginia Pick 4 numbers, not Oregon’s. And miracle of miracles, Virginia’s Pick 4 numbers were the same exact numbers that Oregon was about to draw that day.”

Brancaccio’s column explaining the bizarre circumstances made him a celebrity—with subsequent 4 a.m. interviews on the CBS Early Show and NBC’s The Today Show. As Brancaccio wrote in a follow-up column, “No Autographs, Please! I’m Not a Big TV star.”

news leaders

	Gator quartet (l-r) -- Alison Starling, Ray Lane, Helen Swenson and Susan Hutchison

The first news team in Seattle wears “orange & blue.” KIRO-TV, the CBS affiliate, has the largest news team and has won the Northwest Regional Emmy award four of the last five years. Four key members are UF alumni.

Susan Hutchison, PR 1975, is an anchor on the 5, 6:30 and 11 p.m. newscasts, with 20 years at the station. She is a three-time Emmy Award-winner who has interviewed Presidents Carter and Reagan, Billy Graham and Barbara Bush.

Ray Lane, TEL 1992, a reporter, came to the station last year via WTHI-TV in Terre Haute and WJXT-TV in Jacksonville. He’s drawing on his experience with Florida wildfires to good use in Washington, covering wildfires in the Cascade Mountains.

Alison Starling, TEL 1995, who also joined KIRO in 2000, from WDEF-TV in Chattanooga. She has covered Hurricane Bonnie and the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years.

Helen Swenson is the latest Gator recruit. She became news director last year. In her 20-year career, extending from Pittsburgh to Miami, she received the Associated Press Award for Best Newscast for two consecutive years at Atlanta’s WSB-TV.

Hutchison said, “No other school can boast so many alumni here. We try not to be too obnoxious about our dominance.”

MSNBC.com

	A beluga whale swims in a tank at the Vancouver Aquarium. The aquarium houses five belugas, including a 3-year-old born in captivity. The original four were captured in the wild in Churchill, Manitoba. The photo by Robert Croslin was featured in the April 13-20 MSNBC.com “The Week in Pictures” and won the reader’s choice vote that week.

The top-rated news site on the Internet, MSNBC.com has three Gators in key positions.

Thomas M. Brew, MA 1976, made the leap to the World Wide Web in 1995, after 19 years in newspapers. He is an executive editor at MSNBC, working primarily on partnerships, strategies and special projects.

His first experience with online media came at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News when the newspaper became the first to launch an online edition. “That experience led me to MSNBC,” he said. He earlier worked for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Bradenton Herald.

Robert Browman, JM 1996, and Robert Croslin are multimedia producers. Their responsibilities range from video and audio editing to shooting and producing video and still photos in the field. Both contribute to “This Week in Pictures,” an MSNBC.com feature that combines still photo slide shows, digital audio and interactive video to provide an overview of the stories.

Browman was recently involved in “Aging in America,” a special project that gave readers a glimpse into the lives of the elderly.

Croslin’s work was featured in the MSNBC.com coverage of the “Experience Music Project” (methadone treatment in Seattle) and the Russian space program.

national recognition

Justin Best, JM 2001, a photographer for the Everett (Wash.) Herald, won first place nationally in the National Press Photographers Association "clip" contest for his coverage of the World Trade Organization (W.T.O.) protests in Seattle last fall (below left).

In March 2001, Best photographed the return of the 24 troops who were detained with their spy plane in China. They are pictured (left) as they arrived at the Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island (Wash.). Best also captured the image (below right) of three young girls awaiting the return of th VQ-1 crew.

attorney privilege

Jeff Denson (aka Denkewalter), ADV 1968, is an attorney in Poulsbo. After graduation from UF law school in 1971, he spent 24 years in the Air Force, during which time he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, got a master of laws degree from George Washington University and had eight different assignments in contract law. In his current job (after he retired from the military in 1995), he supervises a five-person legal office that handles construction contracts and environmental mediation efforts for the Navy in the Northwest, including Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Nevada. He and his wife live on Kitsap Peninsula, a 30-minute ferry ride from Seattle. “Reflecting back on my student days,” Denson said, “I think my journalism training has been put to good use in my 30-year legal career. The ability to communicate effectively—in writing and verbally—is an invaluable skill in law practice.”

notes

Robert McClure, JM 1982, is an environmental reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he co-authored a four-part series on “The Mining of the West: Profit and Pollution on Public Lands.” It examined the environmental and economic impact of mining. He has also covered endangered salmon, the battle over logging and the declining health of the region’s marine ecosystems.

McClure said the environment captured his imagination while at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, where he covered restoration of the Everglades.

He lives in Seattle with his wife, freelance writer Sally Deneen, and their dog, Maggie.

Randy Brinson, TEL 1976, is in his 14th year at KCTS-TV, the PBS station in Seattle. He is senior director/executive producer and recently directed the Italian cooking series, “Nick Stellino’s Family Kitchen,” now in its second season of national distribution. He is also coordinating producer for the documentary series “America at War in Color,” a new view of World War II as seen through rare original color film footage. He is also co-executive producer on a documentary project in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution. “The Japanese American Saga” tells the story of immigration and assimilation of Japanese Americans over two centuries.

He and his wife, Diane, have a daughter, a freshman at the University of Washington, and a son who is in the 9th grade.

	Photo by Yvette Cardozo

Yvette Cardozo, JM 1966, and her husband Bill Hirsch, are a writer/photograper team specializing in soft and medium adventure travel, the Arctic and out of the way places and cultures. They've been to China five times and handled assignments in Vietnam, British Columbia and Alaska. The live in Issaquah.

M. Lewis Green, JM 1975, is a full-time social justice and peace activist. For the past two years, he has served as national organizing director for The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a faith-based organization committed to active non-violence. He helped orchestrate The Campaign of Conscience for the Iraqi People. The group seeks to end sanctions against Iraq, believing that too many innocent people suffer.

More recently, Green has been appointed the Northwest regional coordinator for Witness for Peace, a group whose mission is to “support peace, justice and sustainable economies in the Americas by changing U.S. policies and corporate practices which contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin American and the Caribbean.

In an article in the Seattle Times, Green said he gave up a $70,000-a-year job as manager of internal communications at Starbucks for his activism. “Some likely think I should be committed,” said Green, “but sacrificing material goods is a small price to pay if you can make a difference in someone’s life.”

He and his wife live in Lynnwood.

Cheryl Tucker, JM 1974, was the first female on the editorial board of The News Tribune in Tacoma, where she has been since 1978. Besides writing editorials, she handles day-to-day production of the editorial and op-ed pages. She wrote, “Several years ago I made a point of looking up my editorial writing prof, ‘Buddy’ Davis, and wrote a column about him and the changes I saw at UF and Gainesville, particularly how much more racially diverse and tolerant they had become…I had no idea when I took his class that someday I would actually BE an editorial writer, and his training would prove invaluable.”

Peter Adlerberg, TEL 1989, is channel programs manager for VoteHere Inc., specialists in secure electronic and online voting in Seattle.

Susan Hilder Burianek, TEL 1996, works in resource development for Eastside Domestic Violence in Kirkland. She and her husband, Francois, also a Gator, like to hike up nearby Tiger Mountain.

Diane Fine Campbell, TEL 1972, is a self-employed benefit communications consultant in Renton.

	Tom and Kathy Brown Davies

It’s a sunny 4th of July picnic for Kathy Brown Davies, JM 1987, a technical writer for software companies in Seattle, but currently on an extended maternity leave. She and her husband, Tom, have two daughters, Kelsey, 8 ½, and Megan, 15 months. She wrote of technical writing—“It’s not glamorous and certainly is drier than feature writing, but translating geek speak is a great challenge.”

Natalia Dotto, TEL 1988, moved to Seattle in 1995 to become executive producer at NorthWest Cable News, a start-up, 24-hour regional cable network. In 1999, she left to concentrate on raising her daughters—Devon and Dylan, now 7 and 4—and freelance writing and production. She and her husband, also a Gator, wrote, “We try really hard to follow the Gators, but folks out here are more concerned with some team called the Huskies.”

John R. Higginbotham, JM 1965, is retired in Spokane, and is “now a full-time RV’er with a 38-foot Tradewinds dieselpusher.”

Ray A. Hole, PR 1975, is a retired captain for security at the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Sequim, Wash.

Lisa Hornaman, PR 1998, MA 2000, is an account coordinator for Bombar Public Relations in Kirkland. She is “hooked on Washington”—“They call this the ‘Evergreen State’ for a reason—the greenery is lush and abundant year-round…Mountains surround us (the Cascades Range) …I see them in the distance, especially the huge snow-capped Mt. Rainier. This is the ultimate tourist destination.” She lives in Redmond.

Gary Kinder, ADV 1968, is a Seattle attorney and author who teaches writing seminars for lawyers. He said his main objectives are to help them "get the garbage out of their writing and make it come alive." He's working with the American Bar Association to put the course online.

Kinder is the author of three books--Victim: The Other Side of Murder (1982), Light Years (1987) and Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (1998). Victim is the true story of a man who struggled back from a brutal 1974 crime. The book was made into a movie starring Richard Chamberlain.

Kinder's highly successful third book tells the story of the "impossible" 1989 recovery of sunken treasure worth an estimated billion dollars. 428 lives and 21 tons of gold from the California gold rush were lost when the SS Central America sank 200 miles off the Carolina coast in 1857. The book is under contract to Warner Bros.

Kinder has two daughters, 14 and 17.

Angie Finley Lampkin, PR 1992, is a “stay-at-home mom of two boys, ages 5 and 3.” She and her husband, David, are training for their 3rd and 4th triathalons. They live in New Castle.

	Julie Moyer-Nesbitt, Ronald McDonald, and Garry Matlow

Garry Matlow, JM 1977, has a boss who wears big red shoes. Matlow is an executive assistant at Ronald McDonald Charities of Spokane. He was honored last year in the Spokane Public Relations Council’s annual competition for the “Share-a-Night” Campaign.

Matlow’s organization runs a 20-room “home away from home” for families who have children hospitalized in the area. He said, “It’s been the most rewarding job I’ve had because I see the fruits of my labors every day.”

He spent 17 years working for newspapers in Texas and Florida. He and his wife moved to Spokane in 1995, and he earned a certificate in public relations at Eastern Washington University.

Barbara Becker Nelson, TEL 1971, is an office manager at Olympic View Elementary School and on the Emergency Management Team—training students and staff in preparing for emergencies in Federal Way. She wrote, “Federal Way wasn’t hit as hard as some of the surrounding communities (during the recent earthquake)—but we did rock ‘n roll. It was a great chance to see what we need to do before another one hits.”

Dickey Nesenger, TEL 1972, lives in Seattle where she writes and teaches playwriting and screenwriting. Just out of the College, she went to New York with a short film produced in Professor Edward Wells’ class. She became a film editor and eventually relocated to Los Angeles. There she worked as a script supervisor and screenwriter over a period of 15 years—working with such notable directors as John Frankenheimer and Orson Welles. In 1980 her first play was produced at the Met Theatre in Los Angeles. Many of her plays have been produced (and honored) since then.

Stefanie Jarius Pettit, JM 1967, is a public information officer for Eastern Washington University in Cheney. She and her husband, Bruce, also a Gator and member of the 1968 Winter Olympics luge team in Grenoble, have two sons—Carl, 28, a film editor, and Sam, 24, an actor-cartoonist-singer-dancer on his way to Broadway. The Petits enjoy sailing—especially on nearby Lake Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho.

Rosie Bryzelak Sayyah, ADV 1970, claims that she runs the ONLY shop in the U.S. that repairs vintage and costume jewelry. She started “Rhinestone Rosie’s” in 1984 in Seattle. She trains others in the field and lectures on the subject—most recently in April at the West Coast Period and Antique Jewelry Seminar in Pomona, Calif. She has also been an appraiser for the PBS “Antiques Roadshow” program and is featured this fall with host Dan Elias on a segment from the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. She wrote, “There’s no way I can tell you how my training at UF has made my life and careers flexible, fun and never boring…All the moisture here in the Northwest has kept my skin very nice, not gatorlike!” Rosie has a daughter who is a senior in communications at the University of Washington.

Jennifer Smith, PR 1992, is a recruiter for Country Insurance & Financial Services in Seattle.

B. Richard Wright, TEL 1982, describes himself as a “Seattle humorist, psychotherapist and well-known reprobate.” He wrote, “A day without sunshine—is like another day in Seattle.” His wife, Patricia, PR 1988, is a senior clinical quality specialist in the Advanced Technology Laboratories of Phillips Ultrasound. They live in Bothell.