About Steve Stockdale
I’ve never been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn, or a king. But I’ve written poems. And I’ve played six sports, the clarinet, and a scientist. I’ve saluted, navigated, proposed, presented, reported, designed, coded, developed, researched, organized, managed, solicited, taught, read, studied, and written.
Born in New Mexico, bred in Texas, educated in Colorado, trained in California, served in North Dakota, married, parented, and divorced in Texas. Now I’ve returned to New Mexico for Act V.
Things that float my boat: authenticity, originality, individuality, nonconformity, creativity, cooperation, perspective, and sportsmanship. Things that light my hair on fire: lemmings, posers, deceivers, dividers, hypocrites, image-is-everythingers, conventional wisdom worshippers, Elmer Gantrys, born-yesterdays, and Just-Win-Babies.
I stress the importance of differences. One critical aspect of wisdom, or expert-ness, is the ability to differentiate or discern between this and that. We each exhibit varying degrees of expert-ness in everything we do … from our sensory abilities to taste and discriminate (sweet from sour, types of wine, blends of coffee), to our cognitive abilities for expressing ourselves, solving problems, self-awareness, etc.
“We discriminate against people to the degree we fail to distinguish between them.”
Northwestern University Professor Irving J. Lee, 1952
NDIVIDUATE.com
I’ve had my own websites since 1999 when I created ThisIsNotThat. I’ve used WordPress for two years on a blog — DiscernThis! During the spring of 2011 I decided to learn a little more about it so I could do a little more with the blog. I bought a theme, or actually a platform for developing themes, the Pagelines Platform Pro package.
The more I used WordPress the more I liked it. I went through the laborious process of converting my personal website from an HTML-based site to WordPress. I helped my daughter set up her photoblog using WordPress.
Through these experiences, I wanted to advocate WordPress to friends and acquaintances. But I realized that I couldn’t offer a full-throated recommendation for WordPress unless I could recommend a learning process that they wouldn’t find intimidating or frustrating.
So I decided to create that learning process myself. That’s NDIVIDUATE.com.
Portfolio (at stevestockdale.com/portfolio/)
