A. EMPLOYMENT POSITIONS HELD

2006-1999-Writer/Poet: George Town Tasmania
2005-2002-Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston
2004-1999-Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc
1999-1988 -Lecturer in General Studies and Human Services
West Australian Department of Training
1987-1986 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies and Co-ordinator of
Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland, WA.
1985-1982 -Adult Educator, Open College of Tafe, Katherine, NT
1981 -Maintenance Scheduler, Renison Bell, Zeehan, Tasmania
1980-Unemployed: Bi-Polar Disability
1979 -Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian CAE
Youth worker, Resource Centre Association, Launceston
Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Tasmanian CAE
Radio Journalist ABC, Launceston
1978-1976 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities, Ballarat CAE, Ballarat
1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, Whitehorse Technical College,
Box Hill, Victoria
1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston
1973-1972 -High School Teacher, South Australian Education Department
1971 Primary School Teacher, Whyalla SA Australia
1971-1969 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County
Board of Education, Picton, Ontario, Canada
1969 Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co. Ltd. Toronto Ontario
1968-67 -Community Teacher, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern
Development, Frobisher Bay, NWT, Canada
1967-59 -Summer jobs from grade 10 to end of university
1967-1949 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in
Canada: McMaster Uni:1963-1966, Windsor T’s College: 1966/7.
1963-1944 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around
Hamilton Ontario.

B: SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA

I have been married for 37 years. My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 59. We’ve had 3 children: ages in 2005-40, 35 and 28. I am 62, a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written 3 books--all available on the internet. I retired from part-time teaching in 2004 and full-time teaching in 1999 after 30 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 47 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 225 lbs, eyes/hair-brown, Caucasian. See my website for more details at: http://www.users.on.net/~ronprice/ and go to any search engine and type: ‘Pioneering Over Four Epochs’ or ‘RonPrice Poetry’ for additional writings.

So do you like transformers?

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My only son began collecting transformers in the mid-1980s sometime and now has an archive of an extensive collection which my wife and I keep in the house for our son. He has left home and works in another town now. I have never taken any particular interest myself, except by osmosis. It's a bit like cricket here in Australia--for me. I don't take an interest but it is a part of my life because it is a part of his. -Ron Price, Tasmania

Alrighty then.

I read that. My question is still valid.

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Apologies for taking nearly 3 years to reply. But after seeing the movie Transformers, the 2007 live-action/thriller film adaptation of the Transformers franchise, directed by Michael Bay and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, I felt I was back in the world my son brought into my life. Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky, a teenager involved in a war between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, two factions of alien robots who can disguise themselves by transforming into everyday machinery made for a good story for all transformer lovers--well, at least some of the less critical of those lovers.

Wow, this is some grade-A gravedigging. I blame myself, for linking to this thread in your second introduction thread posted today .

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Not to worry, TM2-Megatron. By the time you get to the age of 65 and on old-age pensions as I am, grave-digging becomes more natural, more relevant to your life. I may not get back here--ever--due to the whole question of death and dieing. Life is busy in retirement, though, and I may not get here to interact with you zealous transformer folk as often as I'd like.-Ron in Australia

So there really is a guy named Ron Price, apparently, in Tasmania.

I can't quite tell what's going on here, but I'm intrigued. Based on the number of hits on Google this seems like some kind of elaborate experiment of the grandest of scales.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one that tried Google, lol. I'm similarly intrigued, but I'd say there's also a healthy dose of amusement mixed in with mine. I found a picture, on one of the google hits:

http://www.writers.net/writers/36722

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I'm pleased to see, TM2-Megatron, that you located a photo of me from a photo-shoot in 2004 in Hobart Tasmania when I was a young 60. Now at the age of 65 I am able to receive two old-age pensions. One is from Canada where I worked from 1961 to 1971 and one is from Australia where I worked until 2004. Now I work as a writer, poet, publisher and editor--retired teacher, lecturer, tutor and facilitator--at literally 1000s of internet sites. Here is a bit of my story FYI(for your information) to give some perspective to my current work.-Ron
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GOOGLE-MICROSOFT

In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. With its introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine. In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as casual and most volunteer activity that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprize billions of users in the international marketplace. Not only did Google have billions of users, but internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in google’s growing index/library. It was a finer and more useful library than any of those in the small towns where I would spend my retirement.

In 1994, at the age of fifty and as I was beginning to eye my retirement from FT work as a teacher and lecturer, Microsoft launched its public internet web domain with a home page. Website traffic climbed steadily and episodically in the years 1995 to 1999. Daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996 grew to 5.1 million visitors in 1999. Throughout 1997 and 1998 the site grew up and went from being the web equivalent of a start-up company to a world-class organization. I retired from FT work at just the right time in terms of the internet capacity to provide me with access to information by the truckload on virtually any topic. This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time. From 1999 to 2005, as I say, I released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity.

The Internet has become emblematic in many respects of globalisation. Its planetary system of fibre optic cables and instantaneous transfer of information are considered, by many accounts, one of the essential keys to understanding the transformation of the world into some degree of order and the ability to imagine the world as a single, global space. The Internet has widely been viewed as an essential catalyst of contemporary globalisation and it has been central to debates about what globalisation means and where it will lead.

There are now several hundred thousand readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web. My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 4000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success.

The last eight years of internet posting, 2001-2009, have been immensely rewarding. When one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers. It is almost impossible, though, to carry literary torches as I do through internet crowds or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings singe the beards of some readers and my own occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting, indeed, I might add, of living. Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of: (a) an intimate or not-so-intimate sharing of views in some serendipitous fashion or (b) what seems like a fundamental harmony or dissonance between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks. In some ways, the bridge of dialogue is immensely satisfying; in other ways the gulfs over the valleys of life are unbridgeable. When the latter is the case and when a site is troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism but, rather, to stimulate thought and, as I say, share views. And so, for now, I remain yours sincerely and I look forward to hearing from you should you desire to write again.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia.
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