I am an urban planner by profession and degree, but while I’m looking for work I am also a technology consultant, copy editor, bicycle messenger, ipod manager, technical writer, blog reader, proofreader, and coffee sipper.

Perhaps you don’t have a significant other or know-it-all child or lucky friend to ask you for your computer help when troubles arise. If so, please feel free to give me call. My parents tell me that while I’m busy looking for work I should also make myself useful by helping people with their computer problems. That, after all, is what I do for them when I return home, so, you know, obviously.

But beyond the esteem my parents beam on their tech-savvy son, I also have some street cred. To note, before I became a planner I was a computer dude in Philadelphia, first working with Windows and Macs at the University of Pennsylvania, and then afterward as an open source programmer on linux servers at a small web hosting company in Center City. I gave up that career when I moved away from Philly to go to grad school six years ago. I never really looked back but my talents were always of use, whether it was repurposing an antique Sun server into a low cost web server for my school’s planning program, or configuring a CMS out of Movable Type or WordPress, or simply teaching my coworkers how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator. I also found myself doing a lot of work using ESRI’s ArcView GIS software in addition to the other familiar research and writing tasks of planners.

But now I’m living in the West Washington Square Park neighborhood of Center City Philadelphia and hunting down job leads (that hopefully won’t take me away from Philly again). And while I’m doing so, I’m taking my parents advice to make my IT consulting services available to everyone. It’s a pretty competitive market from what I can see from Craigslist, but I imagine that plenty of folks looking for computer help in Center City might still find this post and give me a call (513.405.3603) for my competitive rates.

It being the Winter holiday season, I thought it might also be pertinent to advertise that I can also be of service ripping compact discs to mp3 players, and providing all the nice cover art and metadata that modern audio players use to organize the music they contain. Give me a call if you’d like to pay someone else to take over the mind-numbing task of ripping CDs and/or correcting your music’s metadata. I was just reminded to add that I also do freelance editing. Need a second (or third) pair of eyes on your paper? Need someone to help polish your text? References available upon request.

And hey, if you’d like some help preparing your charette, researching your plan, or illustrating your reports with maps and charts, don’t hesitate to nab me before someone else does.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“At your service” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.