Posted on February 17, 2011 - by admin

Monroe College and NRHC’s original website

By Cliff Brozo

It was a case worthy of a Sherlock Holmes novel.  Almost two years ago, Monroe College Professor Terry Jewett suddenly passed away while riding his bicycle in New York’s Central Park.  The Monroe community was devastated as this happened the day before the spring semester was scheduled to begin.  Terry had become a big part of the Northeast Region Honors Council and was instrumental in helping Monroe College establish a presence in the Region.   He created and maintained the original version of the site you’re on now – www.nrhchonors.org. 

When the Region officers called with an update to the site, Monroe College was stuck.  No one knew anything about how Terry was managing the site.  They called on Cliff Brozo – a 25-year veteran IT Professor at Monroe – a former Project Leader and Manager in the IT industry – and owner of his own website business www.soxplus.com.   Cliff had his work cut out for him:  No documentation. No passwords, not even a clue to who was hosting the site.  He wasn’t even on the Monroe College Honors Board!

Because Cliff and Terry were friends, he tried several possible passwords to log on as webmaster.  “Sailing”. Nope. “Maine”. Nope. “Audibon”. Nope. All the things that Terry loved to do – none were the correct password.  Through some networking wizardry, Cliff found our which company was hosting the site, contacted them and explained the story of Terry’s passing.  The company was very helpful and after supplying some billing information – Monroe was paying for the domain name -  the company agreed to resend the password.

The original site – a basic version created with plain HTML – needed to be revamped.  Cliff, armed with his knowledge of Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash, reworked the site with the help of the current and past officers of the NRHC, who supplied the content.   For the past two years, Cliff has maintained the site and has also become more active joining the Monroe College’s Honors Board.