I consider myself a search heretic who has bee spouting off about the importance of user experience and information retrieval for the last 8 years. I consider myself fortunate to be able to combine my passions for search and user experience as SR Search Strategist at Portent where they welcome my heresy most of the time. Before landing at Portent Inc, an Internet marketing company, I launched the search marketing and optimization practice for Ascentium that included enterprise search configuration and optimization. Spring sees me teaching Introduction to Information Retrieval as a guest faculty member at the University of Washington Information School.