A brief bio of myself and an explanation of this site

Me

I studied film theory and perceptual psychology at Cornell and developed a passion for animation as well as a fascination with interaction design (which at that time, meant SuperCard).

My first job after college was building and animating 3D molecular models using SoftImage on an SGI Onyx, the system used to create the effects in Jurassic Park. I edited them with video on a Media 100 system and made several 8- to 10-minute videos.

In between other tasks, I learned HTML, the successor to SuperCard and played around with JavaScript on the Mosaic browser. HTML was very easy those days, with no color, no images. I remember the day that table tags were introduced, or when we finally had an option to have non-centered text.

One day, in 1995 or so, I asked my boss why we didn't have a website, since lots of other places were starting to. Without pausing, he nodded and said, "Good idea. Do it". He had someone show me a closet stacked to the ceiling with DEC Alpha workstations. I picked one, plugged it in to the network, installed the NCSA HTTPD from UIUC, and got started hand-coding pages by the hundreds.

In 1997 I moved to New York City, with the hope of moving on with my animation career, but no one was hiring animators. Just about everyone was hiring anyone who knew anything about web development, though, so I took what I thought was a temporary break from animation and got a job at PC Magazine producing their website, which meant hand-coding hundreds of static pages each week. Despite the workload, that was a great time to be in publishing.