October Volunteers of the Month

Lisa Alvarado and Linda King

by Cindy Pao, Information Developer, BMC Software, Inc.

The STC Houston Administration Council is pleased to confer the title of Volunteer of the Month on Lisa Alvarado and Linda King for their work on the STC Houston Competitions.

What We Know About Lisa

Lisa Alvarado works with Aesbus.

Lisa volunteered to help with competitions toward the end of last year. Deborah Silvi forwarded her e-mails to Phaedra Cook, and the rest is history.

Lisa, exerting Herculean effort, secured the Snake River chapter as our trading partner for this year's competitions. She contacted at least a dozen other chapters, only to find that they aren't holding competitions, or that they don't want to trade with a partner as big as the Houston chapter.

Lisa also was in charge of competition communications.

Lisa developed the call for entries for this year's competitions. Then, she recruited Champagne Printing to print the call for entries at no charge.

What We Know About Linda

Linda King is a project manager at Hewlett Packard, where she spends many hours attending meetings and managing projects for the Industry Standard Servers group.

Linda's strengths are being able to review past information with an eye to the present, and approaching the competitions in a strategic manner. Linda is very organized. Her ability to plan well has endeared her to everyone.

Linda's competitions team consists of Lisa Alvarado, Pat Bishop, Lori Buffum, Jaleh Fiers, Mary Gwynne, Lisa Haberle Harlin, Deborah Long, Cindy Pao, and Jeff Staples.

November Volunteer of the Month

Jeff Staples

Cindy Pao, Information Developer, BMC Software, Inc.

STC Houston is pleased to name Jeff Staples as the Volunteer of the Month for November.

Thank you, Jeff, for your work as the chapter Webmaster.

Jeff, the Professional

Jeff holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Houston.

He started out as a systems engineer with British Petroleum and then moved into technical communication with Berger & Company.

Jeff has held technical and marketing communication positions at Berger & Company, BMC Software, BindView, and Kitba/Valley Forge.

Jeff, the STC Superhero

Jeff won the Distinguished Chapter Service Award in 1998. He also won a Distinguished SIG Service Award in 2003 for his outstanding work on the Quality SIG newsletter.

His long and impressive STC resume includes

STC Houston chapter webmaster, 2003-2004
STC Quality SIG newsletter editor, 2002-2003
STC International Marketing Communication committee manager, 1998-2000
STC Houston web team, 2000
STC Houston competitions manager, 1994-1997
STC Houston chapter president, 1996-1997
STC Houston newsletter editor, 1994-1996
Presenter at several STC International and Regional conferences

Jeff has also helped STC Houston win the following awards:

Distinguished Chapter Newsletter, 1995
Chapter of Distinction, 1997
Chapter Newsletter Award of Merit, 1996

Friends Weigh in About Jeff

"Jeff is a no-nonsense, get things done quickly and correctly, quick problem solver kind of guy. If he sees something that needs fixing... in this case, our chapter web site... he volunteers to help fix and then focuses his time and energy to get it completed."

"He can also get an amazing amount of work done in a short amount of time. He's incredibly efficient-just like his wit!"

Would you like to be a volunteer? See the "Help Wanted" list.