About Me
About Me pages are horribly difficult to write and usually boring as batshit to read. I’m not thinking this one will be any different.
I discovered in teh interwebz in 1994 when I lived in Houston. I actually think it was a Time magazine article that inspired me to buy a book at our local Barnes & Noble about how to connect to the net. It had a CD in the back that had browser software (Mosiac, I think) along with some connection software for an ISP (which for the life of me I can’t remember the name of). From there I moved into America Online and it was long until I found myself plopped on the sofa with my laptop, modem cord running across the room, watching Law & Order while I chatted about how great the show was and how hawt Chris Noth was with about six other L&O fanatics in teh Law & Order group.
I continued to be an avid net surfer when I moved to Australia in 1996 and in 1998 I read my first online journal and decided that sounded like a great idea. So off I went to Geocities, got myself a little piece of the web (anonymous, of course) and started teaching myself HTML. I quickly moved on to Dreamweaver 2 and ‘dreamed’ of becoming a web designer, but quickly grew tired of how different browsers handled things differently and soon realised I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t have the proclivity to learn. But still, I felt like I ‘got’ the web (whatever the fuck that means) and moved into the web scene on the marketing side in 1999/2000 ... I quickly became disillusioned by the lack of solid business practices and the somewhat shonky world of the web that I encountered and exited, stage left.
Despite that setback, I still loved the web. I loved the fact that anyone, anywhere, could publish to the world. That you could learn about anything you’d ever thought of – and some things you’d never even knew existed – without leaving home. Not all of the web is good, obviously, but that’s more a function of people than technology. I slowly increased my technical knowledge ... moving to Movable Type in 2001 led me to learn some basic PHP stuff and the ins and outs of a content management system. And it introduced me to CSS. Which eventually led me to discover the Web Standards movement.
Fast forward to 2008 and I find myself working at a University, writing code and copy and pushing pixels as the online communications manager during the day and leading a 25-man World of Warcraft raiding guild at night. Most of my life is spent at or near a computer. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or how long that will last. But with the support of a patient husband, a slow-moving Golden retriever and a somewhat ornery cat, I’m loving every minute of it.