About

Ten Second Summary

Born in Oklahoma to a midwife (boo on hospitals), aspired to be a commercial artist as a youth. Became an informal student of the web world while a formal student of the arts. Got a degree in English, got serious about the web in the down time. Went pro about seven years ago, never looked back. Love puzzles, problems, debacles to fix, turning tricky situations into positive outcomes.

Job Titles Held / Hats Worn (in order of recency)

Flash Developer, JavaScript getting-it-done-in-er, the second person you hire to clean up after the first one, Web Consultant, Senior Web Developer, Creative Team Lead, Web Designer, SEO specialist, web contortionist

How Many Moons?

I was born the same weekend that "Never Say Never Again" was #1 at the box office. I think that makes me an honorary secret agent man.

Coffee Consumed Daily

2-7 cups

Smoker?

Totally not.

Single?

Not married, but not on the market either. In fact, the S.O. was the captain of her rifle team, so you better watch out.

Ideal-World Time Occupation

I was an education minor in college, so I would love to be doing web work that helps people learn. I love freerice.com and would love to work for myself building something like it.

Religious?

Meh. One is as good as another as long as you do stuff to help others. The specifics kind of seem like Coke versus Pepsi.

Loves

Building stuff
Knowing the tools I use as well as they can be known
Creative solutions to interesting problems
Words and language
Clean, smart design

Lusts

JQuery
French pressed coffee
ActionScript 3.0
Building your website better than you thought it could be built
Knowing every little intricacy of whatever I'm dealing with

Longings

To be rich enough to work on the projects I want to work on.
To build your website better than you thought it could be built.
To be able to take care of my family if they need it
To get back to France and a couple other places eventually.
To know everything.

Initialisms

As a friend once said, technology initialisms are like belt buckles for nerds. That being said, listed here are those acronyms and initialisms that I would gladly affix dinner-plate-size to my waist line. Yeehaw!

Flash / ActionScript 3.0 and AS 2.0 if I haaaave to.
JavaScript/AJAX Always unobtrusive, always gracefully degrading
XHTML/HTML, CSS If it's not well-sliced, hand-coded, and semantic, no es bueno.
PHP (4 and 5)
MySQL
ASP.NET (I'm not C# wizard, but I can get the job done)

If any of that made sense to you, you probably also get that while I am a developer, my wont is for the front-end. I like making the stuff that the user actually uses. Not that lower-level stuff isn't just as exciting and important, I've just always preferred a more concrete way to judge the quality of my work.

Fax Boycott

Join the movement! And by movement, I mean me.

Seriously though, I am currently boycotting the fax world. We live in an email world where message zip across the globe in seconds, yet some places still ask you to send crumby, low-res black and white facsimiles at a blinding 56kbps peak speed often for more than $1.00 per page? You've got to be kidding. So, here the movement begins.

Give your fax machine to a farmer in the country where it can run free (or smash it and tell your kids you did).