Another site design, another about page...
I'm never quite sure what to write on these pages. I guess I'll try a brief biography this time.
I was born and raised in Vineland, NJ. It's a boring place and smells mostly of fertilizer. It was rated one of the worst places to live in some travel book in 1999. I went to a private Christian school for eight years (kindergarten through 7th grade), where I was far too well-behaved for my own good. My 8th grade was spent at a public middle school that brought me up to speed on how normal kids acted. High school was spent moving awkwardly through honors classes, making a scant number of lasting friends, and generally wishing that I was elsewhere. I finished high school with a general disdain for learning things that were both uninteresting to me and of little use to my day-to-day or potential future life.
I went to college at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. I majored in Computer Science, since all I knew about my future was that I would be spending a lot of time at or near a computer. Most of my life at college is documented in the ximwix archives already, since that is when I came up with the word (an origin that only I and possibly shmike are aware of) and created the website. To summarize, I was very geeky, very moody, and undoubtedly depressed.
After college, I managed to snag a great programming job with CSC. I feel it necessary to mention that this was due in great part to some legwork by Andy (remember, kids, it's not who you are, it's who you know!). CSC is an enourmous company. I work for only a single office, but I have seen slides -- note the plural form -- describing the hierarchy of departments and sectors in a meticulously designed flow chart. I take comfort in the fact that there are others like me in the other leaves of that chart who know just as little about their neighboring sectors as I do my neighbors. We will never meet, but we reside in the same Powerpoint slide, equally confused, mystified, and, nonetheless, diligent.
I don't know if the moodiness and depression that have accompanied my life for last decade or so have subsided to a normal level, or if they've simply run their course and left me cynical. Either way, I feel a lot more positive than I used to. Cautiously optimistic at best, and critically negative at worst (with more than a fair share of silliness in either case).
But enough about me -- on to the site! I've always considered ximwix an e/n site. That stands for everything/nothing. They used to be fairly popular, but have sinced been hunted down, shot, and stuffed. Most of them now adorn the walls of numerous blog sites. I guess I don't find blogs to be personal enough on their own (especially on sites like livejournal or blogger, which use templates and cookie-cutter code). I think that when someone runs a site, they should be intimately acquainted with the code beneath it. This allows them to add pointless features and annoy users with broken widgets. How human is that? People have a lot of good to offer, but it takes getting past all of the annoying stuff. e/n sites had that kind of vibe to them. You had a better sense of who the webmaster was simply by working your way through all the quirks on their site.
I suppose that's just about enough for an about page. That picture is from January 2006, in case you were wondering. Lynx the cat passed away on October 15th, 2007. May he rest in peace.
Thanks for reading.