By Brian Livingston

Every time I think I’m learning my job around here, new people show up who make me work harder to keep up with them.

The latest role models making me pale by comparison are a new technical editor and a new full-time administrator for the Windows Secrets Lounge.

I’m proud to announce that WS has hired Tracey Capen to oversee the content of the WS newsletter, Web site, and discussion board. You can see his head shot at the top of today’s Lounge Life column, so I’ve pasted at right a rather bundled-up photo of this inveterate mountain climber scaling Alaska’s Mt. McKinley with a team of 12 in 2000.



Tracey (whose last name is pronouned “CAY pen”) was executive editor of reviews at PC World magazine for 10 years, from 1995 to 2005. In that capacity, he was executive manager of the PC World Test Center and assigned stories to a staff of eight editors.

Prior to PC World, Tracey was managing editor of reviews at InfoWorld magazine from 1993 to 1995. There he oversaw a staff of 34 editors, technical analysts, and test developers. Earlier, he worked from 1989 to 1992 in InfoWorld’s test center and as networking editor. (My long-ago InfoWorld column, Window Manager, ran from 1991 to 2003 and overlapped Tracey’s tenure, but he and I never met because I seldom visited the mag’s old San Mateo offices.)

Between his gigs at InfoWorld, Tracey was senior labs editor at Corporate Computing magazine, a Ziff-Davis publication that lasted one year, from 1992 to 1993. He oversaw Corporate Computing’s product testing and wrote First Looks reviews of networking and mobile products.

Tracey takes over as Windows Secrets’ technical editor in the stead of Dennis O’Reilly, who served us well since April 2008. Dennis, a former PC World senior associate editor, owns a home in Santa Rosa, Calif., and has flown to Seattle at Windows Secrets’ expense almost every week for the past two years. He’s accepted a position with an environmental air-quality monitoring company, Sonoma Technology Inc. of Petaluma, which will allow him to go home every night and not commute 1,000 miles to work.

Our new full-time Lounge admin is Keely Dolan (left), an experienced participant in several Internet discussion boards. Among other environments she’s endured, Keely was for several years a moderator of forums for SomethingAwful.com. That’s a gigantic (300,000 posts per week) and somewhat crazy discussion board that specializes in Internet humor.

She’s seen first-hand how conversations can go downhill when a Web forum tolerates crude language and bad behavior. Keely knows that the WS Lounge is intended to be safe for work, and she’s committed to helping the Lounge stay as friendly and welcoming to newcomers as it is helpful to PC power users.

If you’re not already a Lounge member, you should register now. That enables you to post comments and take advantage of other Lounge features available only to those who are signed in. It’s free! Just use our quick registration form.

If you’re already registered, you can jump right in to today’s discussions. I’ll see you in the Lounge!

Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com and co-author of Windows Vista Secrets and 10 other books.

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