About this item
Born in Missouri more than a century ago and raised in a Pentecostal orphanage, the creature now calling himself Gelson Verber has changed his name countless times. He's part-werewolf, and makes his living hunting certain kinds of bad men - criminals, rapists, thugs - in an often grotesque parody of the natural order. Verber is clearly suffering from the kinds of things a werewolf would be uniquely vulnerable to in the modern world: the horror of war, drug abuse, and isolation in the rain-drenched environment of Portland, Oregon. He has PTSD, but in a unique way, often flashing back to his time with a regiment in World War II.His smooth life as a serial killer takes a turn when he falls into the crosshairs of Salt Street, a development corporation running pirated criminology software and Big Data sieves to identify werewolf hybrids, who are then forced into servitude.
About the Author
Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability and universal accessibility. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked as a UI designer and implementer, engineer manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Sun Microsystems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was Chair of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. In 1990, he co-chaired the first Participatory Design conference, PDC'90. He has taught at Stanford University and Mills College, and in 2006 and 2013 taught HCI as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Since 2004 he has served on the SIGCHI Public Policy Committee. In 2013 he presented in the prestigious Authors@Google talk series. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and in 2016 received SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored or co-authored many articles and chapters on Human-Computer Interaction, as well as the books GUI Bloopers, Web Bloopers, GUI Bloopers 2.0, Designing with the Mind in Mind, Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson) , Designing with the Mind in Mind, 2nd edition, and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn) .
He is married to Karen Ande, a documentary photographer who works for relief organizations in Africa that support children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, and who is also the author of a book (see http://FaceToFaceAfrica.com) .
