David Beavers

You have reached the website of David Beavers. It is thoroughly boring. Why, you ask? This website will come up in a search under my name by a perspective employer and I don’t want him/her to look at it and think I’m the kind of person they don’t want to hire. I have deleted any material that might not make me look like a saint. Therefore, this website will be as bland as my personality while in the office (and let’s face it, most everywhere else). Thank you.

The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory: During my more impressionable years, I worked as an intern at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. In the communications department, I was given free reign to work on whatever projects I was interested in. Naturally, I picked nothing but the best. Here are some of my more prestigious assignments:

• Bedtime Tips: You’re having trouble getting your children to bed at night and those sleeping pills you purchased at a Mexican pharmacy are making you think twice. Here are some more natural solutions.

• Playing Games: Not one of my better works, this story served merely as a vehicle to advertise the Lab’s new website, Library in the Sky. We all have to start somewhere.

• By Request...: Three times a year, the Lab publishes a comprehensive study focused on various educational issues. This installment looks at successful title I schools in areas with high poverty rates. While generally helping with the entire publication, my biggest contributions were in writing the Idaho and Montana school profiles.

The Portland Challenge: Three years ago, Jay Boss Rubin founded the Portland Challenge after a night of debauchery led to a race from Portland’s Council Crest park to the top of Mt. Tabor. The catch: you were forbidden to use money, motors or bridges. The four contestants were forced to swim the Willamette river, giving birth to a fundraiser to benefit the House of Peace and Love in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. I was fortunate enough to edit, and help design the website.

Throughout the years, I have made many friends with my disarming personality, and endearing sense of humor. Some of these friends are in the internet business as well. Here are some of their sites.

• Justin Montgomery: Justin is a whiz with the computer, and played a leading role in creating the Portland Challenge website. His page is filled with interesting links, humorous tidbits, and other trivial information.

• Portland to Taiwan: Mosha Foster and Nathan Javens embarked on a pilgrimage to Taiwan a couple of years ago. They have been keeping us Portlanders up to date on their day-to-day activities, and exploits. There are also some beautiful pictures of a country I probably couldn’t find on a map.

• House of Peace and Love: The House of Peace and Love is run by Elvis Kimisha in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Its original intent was to act simply as an orphanage, taking in eight orphans last year. But the project has grown in scope over that past months, and now acts as a community and learning center. This site is currently under construction, but will be up and running within a few weeks.

Here are some sites that I like to visit, but can’t remember the URL for. You may enjoy them as well.

• Yale Law's Avalon Project

• American Rhetoric

• MIT Internet Classics Archive

• The Library of Congress

• Bartleby

Contact Me: As you can imagine, I have many adoring fans trying to get in touch with me. I gave out my address a few years ago, and I had to move within a week. But technology has allowed me to communicate with the masses, while avoiding physical contact with any of them. Feel free to drop me a line at any time.

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