About Me : Part 45

Don’t look for the other 44 parts… they don’t exist. So why did I pick 45 and not 1 or some other number? Because.

So, who the hell am I, anyway? And does anyone really know who they are? Yes. Some people say that I tend to show a side of myself here that they don’t often see… a somewhat darker side, I suppose, and judging by the stylesheet of this page, it’s appropriate. I’m not afraid to show the darker aspects of Who I Am here in my blog… a lot of other people aren’t that honest, not even to themselves. A shame. If you spend your life denying that part of yourself, you lie to yourself. If you lie to yourself, you lie to other people as well. I prefer honesty, even when it’s painful.

I write, therefore, I am a writer. I read somewhere one time that about 78% of all writers are also chronically depressed, and no one is really sure if writing helps or makes the depression worse, I’ve seen research that says both. I think it tends to vary according to the person. For me, writing has been a tremendous help with my depression… the poetry especially, though I haven’t written any new poems in a while. I suppose that’s a good sign, when you think about it. I’ve written both fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, freewriting and strict format writing. I’ve worn out several keyboards, and the one I’m currently using is worn smooth and shiny and some of the letters are beginning to fade. I do my best writing after midnight.

I’m a Wife and Mom. I have two sons, ages 13 and 15. The fifteen-year-old is learning to drive this summer… and yes, a few more grey hairs for me. Both the boys are computer and video game enthusiasts, and they like to create art… like me. I’ve also found that they secretly are writers, as well. My spouse restores classic cars and is a landlord. He may be going overseas later this year to work in law enforcement in Iraq. I’m not in favor of the idea for a lot of reasons. It keeps me up at night, feeds my insomnia.

I’m a webmaster. I’ve created several different sites online, both my own and in conjunction with friends and others. I’ve written html with notepad, but I don’t enjoy that aspect of it. I much prefer content creation. I don’t like to do programming… there’s so much open-source code lying around that I see no point in reinventing the wheel, though I don’t mind tweaking code to suit my purposes. My sites consist of about 95% php, css, with a mysql backend, and are generated on the fly. I do have static pages, too, with some fancy javascript and other doo-dads, but those are becoming fewer as the years go by. I occasionally play with palettes and layout in FrontPage2002, and tend to build web forms with that, too. For graphics, I use PaintShop Pro 7.04 along with some nice filter packages. I’m also in danger of becoming a fontaholic, and have to stop myself from installing so many on my computer system.

For several years I was seriously involved in fully interactive 3D worlds, but developers in that area seem to be in a holding pattern. I haven’t completely lost interest in 3D, it’s just not been made accessible to the web-at-large and until it is, we’re stuck with vastly disparate VR systems, with expensive hardware requirements and/or subscription fees, and no way to hook them all together. It’s disheartening, to say the least. Siggraph 2003 is coming to southern California at the end of next month, though, so maybe something new will turn up there. I had hopes that Dr. Alan Kaye would get the TeaTime project completed, but the Squeak language is not all that well-known among internet users, and few are willing to spend the time learning how to program it… if they could find a tutorial that was easy to follow, that is. Squeak tends to appeal to the academic world, but almost no where else. Adobe shot themselves in the foot when they didn’t build a central portal for Atmosphere and an easy way for users to connect all their worlds together. I haven’t tried the Builder in a long time, and I’m not sure it would run on my WinXP machine anyway. The early versions crashed my machine repeatedly, and the user manual is worthy of a college degree if you can get all the way through it without falling asleep or giving up in the middle of it all. The SecondLife project seems promising, but again, it’s a proprietary system, requires high-end graphics cards and broadband, and will be subscription-based. My friend, Steller, is working there as an employee. I wish they’d hire MacB and CC, too.

Time for me to sleep.