Personal stuff

I grew up in Riverside, California, at just the right time. I could walk anywhere - the mall, Sav-On, school, the library, the Wienerschnitzel, anywhere important. Later on I went to UCLA. Even later I went to the University of Arkansas.

Eventually, I married a physics professor at the U of A (more about him can be found on his own page). We settled down a bit in Fayetteville, and now we have two kids.

Before all that, I enjoyed a TV show called Scarecrow and Mrs. King. When my oldest child was born, I found myself at home a lot playing with our Mac IIsi. For kicks, I taught myself how to make web pages. Things were a lot simpler then, believe me. I've seen html evolve from simple mark-up to the complicated mess it is today. At any rate, I made myself a Scarecrow web page, and I've been making pages ever since.

Work Stuff

All that web page making to keep myself busy started to turn into something a little more... I started making web pages for the Physics Department at the U of A. I started with just a few, and then we sort of re-did the whole web site. Eventually, we set up our own web server, primarily to run an online homework cgi program. Naturally, I wrote the program, too. This project started about a semester before WebCT showed up on campus. Well, even though we still have WebCT, some of the professors/instructors in the department continue to use this cgi.

The cgi is written in REALbasic. That led to another RB cgi, this one for an online telescope run by Dr. Lacy, our astronomer. The really sad thing is that these things all run on old Macs, running OS 9. I'll have to update them someday, to OS X.

I should also mention, at this point, that, as my younger child started going to kindergarten, I started teaching in the department. I've taught the GE astronomy class, a class called Physics and Human Affairs (a non-science major physics class), and Physics for Elementary Teachers (more about that on their web page)

Other interesting stuff, if you find this stuff interesting

So, these days I do a lot of web page stuff, but it is mainly updating class web pages. I try to have some fun with that, but somehow making web pages doesn't hold the same thrill for me that it once did.

These days I have become terribly interested in other ways to get content onto the web. I've used PHP for a couple of projects, then I started trying to learn Ruby on Rails. I liked that a lot, but I had loads of trouble trying to install it on the Mac servers at school, so I pretty much gave up. Now I am dabbling with Django, which is a Python based web framework, in the same spirite as Rails. There are several nice things about it, including the fact that I can actually get it to work on our servers. I've made more progress with Django than I did with Rails (here on my computer at home). The Python syntax is pretty easy to pick up, and all in all it is enjoyable. Maybe someday I'll even get a project finished and online....

I also enjoy photography. I'm not any good at it, but I enjoy it anyway. And digital photography is so nice - you don't waste a lot of money on bad pictures on slides or anything. You can take as many as you like and delete them all later.

A while ago my husband enjoyed a sabbatical in Maryland, and naturally our whole family went. I'm afraid I've fallen in love with the area around Our Nation's Capital (if you are an American, that is). If you've never been, you really should go.

So, that's a little bit about me. You want more? Well, I've got a web page about Gunsmoke, and other various and sundry items that you can read all about on the previous version of this page. If you're not that interested, you can quit now (in fact, I'm surprised you've lasted this long...)

One last note, since you are still reading - the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope "Road To" movies are really quite funny, if you like that sort of thing.