How I came to be a geek

I had to write this down in case I start to forget the details. I haven’t really put much time into editing it.

When I was little, I loved horses. The first time I rode a horse was when my family took a vacation to Ranch Rudolf in Traverse City, MI. I think I was about five years old. We went trail riding, and I remember being in line, waiting to be assigned to a horse, with my mom, and I was SO hoping to ride a WHITE horse. Because princesses ride white horses. Well, we rode a brown horse. Still, it was glorious, and ever since then, I longed to own a horse. I collected toy horses, I crawled around the house pretending to be a horse, I tied a “lead rope” (a.k.a. my jump rope) to my bike and pretended IT was a horse, I drew pictures of horses, and I read all kinds of books about horses from the library. When I was older, I continued reading horse stories, and began writing my own horse stories. I may post one here eventually.

My all time favorite horse stories were the Thoroughbred book series by Joanna Campbell (and various authors after Joanna quit after book 14). There are 72 books in the series all together. My library in Stanton, MI had books 1 through 24 on the shelf. I also found an online message board that was dedicated to the book series. It was at this time that I was introduced to “fan fiction.” Dozens of girls from all over the country met at this site to share their own Thoroughbred spin-off stories. It opened up a whole new world for me. I loved horses, and I loved to write and draw.

Many of the girls on the forum had written so many stories, that they created their own websites to host them. I wanted to be taken seriously as a young author (smirk), so one day I picked up my older brother’s copy of “HTML for Dummies” (great start, I know) and learned how to make a website.

It was easy! And with web hosting providers like Geocities and Tripod, it was free! No sooner than I had finished a website, I was already working on my next layout. After all, my authoress heroes had the latest and greatest sites, and I had to keep up. I remember discovering FreeWebs.com one day, and I created yet another website (using frames, the coolest technique around, of course) to hold my stories*, poetry, and character/horse name generators, which I made using customizable scripts from the Javascript Source.

I wouldn’t say that I outgrew my love for horses, necessarily, but I think one day I realized that it wasn’t very likely that I was going to own a horse (financial reasons, mainly). And I had so many other interests to pursue. So I started concentrating on web design, and somewhere between my first real web design job (for $150) and landing a job at Cornerstone University Radio as the website content manager, I decided that this was something I could do long term.

So here I am. Six-or-so years later, and there is so much that I still don’t know, that I refuse to quit until I learn it all. So, I guess I’m in it for the long haul. =)

*I’m almost mortified that these are still on the internet, so read at your own risk.

look ma no flash

Today was my first day back to work, so I enlisted the help of my coworker, Topher, to straighten out some of my Linux problems and install some things I HAVE to have to do my job. Well, I haven’t been able to view Flash on the internet since I installed Linux, so he said he could find out why, and it turns out that because I have a 64 bit processor (AMD Athlon X2), I CAN’T view Flash. At all. So, that seriously inhibits my ability to do my job AND I can’t watch any online videos…which, I occasionally might want to do, possibly. I just don’t like the idea that I can’t do it. I’d rather be able to do it but just choose not to. Stay tuned to see if there is a solution for this problem or if I am defeated and have to return to my former OS, Windows (please, no).

the switch

Today I decided to be adventurous and switch to the Linux operating system, Ubuntu 7.10 to be exact. I downloaded and installed it with no help, so I’m quite proud of myself. I like the look and feel, but I am having a horrible time adjusting to the rest of it (different directory names, file types, system configuration, etc). Photoshop is difficult to get to work on Linux, but luckily Linux has its own photo editing software, a free program called The GIMP. It has very similar features to Photoshop, but the layout is completely different, and seeing as how I need it 5 days a week, I really need to get used to it soon. I don’t miss any of the other Windows software (maybe because I never used it), but installing anything period on Linux has turned out to be very confusing to me. I really am sick of Windows though, so hopefully I will catch on swiftly. So far I’ve reinstalled all of my fonts and imported my old bookmarks, and the rest of my documents are at home on my husband’s external hard drive. I won’t have time to play with it again until I return from Florida on the 27th. Yes, that’s right. I’m going to have a warm, sunny, green Christmas! See you all next year!