Rambled 1469 times since February 2002
About Me
The first picture, taken in Austin, Texas around 1977, is one of my mother’s favorites. The photographer was having a hard time making me smile, until he pulled out this really cool, red, sparkly ball and let me hold it. Then I was all grins. I seemed to have had reddish hair back then. It’s visible in a couple other pictures taken back then too. I’m not sure where the red tint went, although you can just see it in the next picture.
The second picture was taken about four years ago… in my bathroom. I needed a headshot of myself for another project, but didn’t have another room with a solid background, and I didn’t want to go have one taken. Call me cheap.
Background
I didn’t get into computers until summer ‘94 while I was in university. My parents had a dog PC at home, but I never really used it except to play the flight simulator that ran off of some old 5 ¼ discs. The College of Communications used mostly Macs though, and I was quickly christened a Mac zealot.
My training was in graphic design and mostly dealt with printed material. I later continued my training at Media Village Europe in Altensteig, Germany where I learned the true power and freedom of digital art. I’ve never really bothered with print material since then.
I made my first Web site in April ‘96, and have never lost my excitement for the medium. Since then I’ve made sites for clients from all over the world. My construction method of choice has taken a full circle. I first made my pages by hand-coding. I then slowly moved to GoLive before Adobe bought them out. Then I tried my hand at Macromedia Dreamweaver and hated it. Now I do all my sites by hand again. The code is leaner, cleaner and quicker to put together. GoLive and Dreamweaver just get in the way. All during this time I was learning new technologies as they matured: Flash, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, etc.
I will continue to build sites as long as people want them. I love doing it. Hopefully that will never change.
During my time in college, I got to see a bit of the world and make some close friends who I still keep in touch with. I’ve been to Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Germany and Hungary. I haven’t traveled in a bit though, and would love to go visit my friends sometime. I think my next trip will most likely be to Switzerland since I have many friends there. I can stay in places with views like this.
I finally bought an Xbox 360 along with a few games. It’s amazing how far game consoles have come since the old Atari days. Back then, your game character consisted of about 20 pixels and it was the coolest thing we’d ever seen. Now I look at the graphics and gameplay of games like Gears of War and am stunned at how cool it looks. I’m looking forward to seeing where games are in the next 20 years.
The ten most recent movies I've seen are Apocalypto, Transformers, Failure To Launch, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Curse of the Golden Flower, The Prestige, The Pursuit of Happyness, One Night With The King, Pan's Labyrinth, and Cinema Paradiso. If you feel like it, you can take a gander at all 1202 movies I've seen so far.
Tools of the Trade
My main tools of the trade are TextMate, Transmit and Adobe Photoshop. My browser of choice is Firefox, but I also use Safari and Opera to test my designs. I run Apache, PHP and MySQL on my 20" Intel iMac so I can quickly mock up a functional site for testing. I’m running Windoze XP Home on a second partition on my Mac using Boot Camp. I also use Parallels so I can easily test my designs in IE/Win without needing to reboot into Windoze. Very handy!
This site is managed (with ease) through ExpressionEngine, with sprinklings of my own PHP and MySQL throughout. It resides on an EngineHosting server.
The site is designed to conform to web standards. If I’ve done my homework, every page should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2. The site should be tolerable in all browsers on all platforms. The layout is accomplished with pure CSS, which IE seems to revel in destroying.