homethe original smiley page. well, maybe a little different blogwhat i've been up to lately lifei spend a lot of time away from the computer. here's proof sportvarious sporting activities. may or may not be appropriate for the season. lunchrandom lunch location generator. hungry in oakland and don't know where to go? just ask lunch otherslinks to other quality web resources, friends' websites, games and other ways to kill some time online resumewhat i do to keep the lights on stuffbuy a t-shirt. you know you want one.

smiley on the web

This is a story of how the smiley page came to be. Many many years ago, when I started looking for my first full-time job after college in the spring of 1998, online job search websites were just coming onto the scene. In fact, the internet in general was blowing up. So I decided that I needed to develop a presence on the web, and post my resume, so that people would find it and hire me. Maybe I could even get a job at some internet company somewhere. This plan didn't really work out because I graduated with a BS in Biology, and most internet companies weren't hiring molecular biologists.

So my web page didn't really help me get a job, but I didn't really bother to change it much: I had other things to do. I mainly used it to post pictures of stuff I had been doing, but not on any kind of regular basis-- just a couple of times a year. That is, until the fall of 2001, when I saw a web page called 100 words. 100 words was a project to get contributers to write exactly 100 words a day, each day, for a month. An exercise in group creative writing, as it were. I thought it was a neat idea, and I started writing for 100 words, but then I started getting frustrated by the constraint. Sometimes I had a lot more to say than I could fit in 100 words! So I started keeping a blog. And then I stopped again for a while. And started again, and stopped.

And then two things happened. The first was that my name got listed on the web page for Boy Scout Troop #205 in Kalamazoo, Michigan as an Eagle Scout alumni. Before that happened, my resume or my home page would come up first in a google search if you searched for my name; now it was the Boy Scouts (They are indexed on Yahoo! as a national organization, which I guess automatically makes them more “relevant” than my own page for google's definition of the word relevant...). So I had to do something about that. And the second thing that happened at about the same time was that I got a friendly note from the sysadmins at CalTech, telling me that since I haven't been a student for 5 years, they were finally going to delete my accounts and cut off my email access to the undergraduate cluster that I had been using since the first time I took CS1. So I had to do something about that, too.

What I did was to move everything to a new host, at www.malachiarts.org. And then I contacted the webmaster for the Troop #205 web page, and asked her to link to me so that if someone was to click on the first page that google brings back if you search on my name, that person would have link to contact me directly. And she DENIED my request! She said that some of the material that I was linking to from my home page was offensive and inappropriate. And she was right. So I realized that it was time to update this page a little bit, to bring it up to speed with the five years of developments that have happened since the initial page was created in 1998, and the five years I have personally aged. As a stopgap, I removed the offensive links so that (Troop 205 Webmaster) Anne would link to me, and then I planned some improvements.

What you see now is a new site, created entirley with free software. The HTML was written mainly in the pico or OpenOffice text editors on Slackware Linux. The site uses CSS to format pages (thanks to Eric Mayer) and Server Side Includes for the Apache HTTP server to centralize maintenance tasks. One of the pages uses a perl cgi script to generate dynamic content. All of the gallery pages were made with igal. In the great tradition of web design, I found some stuff that I liked on other websites, and adopted it as my own. Likewise, if you like the design and/or operation of this site, please feel free to copy the design.

The renovations have probably broken some links, especially on the older blog pages; if you find a broken link and you'd really like to see where it pointed, email me and i'll try to chase it down for you.

A note about browser compatability: this page uses a pretty minimal implementation of css. I have tested it against a few popular platforms, and it looks and works right on *most* of them. There are known issues with Opera and with Netscape 4.7 or earlier, and with early versions of IE as well. The pages comply with the published standards; if you don't see mouseover effect on the links at left, or if the links appear as a lumped-together mess at the top of the page, odds are your browser doesn't support css correctly. You're honestly not missing much on this page, but for the sake of the rest of the web you should really consider downloading and running firefox. It will make your whole web experience more enjoyable, as long as you do this: run the download, click on tools->options->web features, and check the box that says "block popups." Presto!