Welcome
to my (dumb little) home page...


Just about every kid will face the challenge of a "personality conflict with a teacher." Of the many ways to handle this challenge is to look at it as good practice for adulthood, when the exact same thing will happen in the workplace.
-- Jeff Herring, Seattle Times, 12/5/99

So, this is my chance to tell the world what a cool person I am. And with all that pressure, I've put off updating my web page until I could do something cool for it, with graphics and interactive widgets and all that, but I never seem to have coinciding time and inspiration (or, maybe I'm just not a very cool person after all!). So I'm starting out by learning some Perl, Javascript, and about server-side includes to automate some links and updates, so that as I make changes I don't have to change every linked page as well.

In fact, the web page you are looking at doesn't actually exist as an html page. It is generated by a script each time someone visits it. I set it up this way because I've collected some quotes I like and wanted to use them. But I didn't just want a page of quotes. So my perl script picks a random one from the quotes file, inserts it into a basic web page framework, and sends the whole thing to your browser. (Just keep reloading the page to see more quotes.)

I did the silly little images below. I'm no graphic artist, but I didn't want to just swipe stuff I found on the web, either (well, ok, I started the soccer ball with a nice image I found on the web, but I modified it a bit, and if you pay attention, you'll see that picture of me elsewhere on this site). I'll eventually have images for each of my link categories. My script also looks for other pages that I have modified within the past couple weeks and inserts an "updated" note below the image (or text).

Check out the new Spiro-Graph I've been coding. You'll need Sun's free Java Plug-in (sorry - that was the only way I could get the swing classes to load correctly! If you know a better way, please tell me). The SpiroGraph we played with as kids is made by Hasbro -- I was really surprised by the number of SpiroGraph web sites I found while trying to find that information! My applet's just in the beginning stages, and I can see from some other sites that I've got my work cut out for me.


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Enjoy your stay!
[email protected]


2/11/01