who is cookiecrook?
a bit about me (the summary)
I’m a graphic designer and multimedia/technology enthusiast. I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in May 99 and have been working in the web field ever since. I am very picky about clean code and web standard specifications which is why this site uses css-positioned <div> tags instead of tables and validates XHTML 1.1 strict compliant and CSS 2.0 compliant. It also conforms to the W3C’s recommendations of complete separation of style from content.
My hobbies include video production and live experimental video work. I’m also really into music: mainly electronic and hip-hop but I’m open to all styles of music. However, I’m very picky about music. I only like about one-percent of one-percent of any music that I hear — even in the genres that I prefer. I’ve always said that 99.99% of any genre is crap. It’s finding that other one-percent of one-percent that makes it all worthwhile.
Despite the fact that I seem so obsessive from my auto-biography here, I’m actually fairly laid back and really easy to get along with. Don’t worry, the pickyness comes with the territory of being a designer.
a bit about me (the details)
Going into college, I couldn’t decide whether or not to be a programmer or a graphic designer. I had been an artist since I was a kid, but had a great fascination with technology and a good understanding of mathematics.
When I was in school, I worked in the Studio Art Computer Lab for three years. It was a great experience because I had nothing to do all day except learn more about the stuff I was interested in to begin with. Even when I was helping a student solve a problem, I couldn’t help but learn new things. As a student in art school, I worked predominantly with video and web media. A few of my videos and one of my websites were featured in the student shows. My senior year I concentrated more on web design and client-side technologies. I graduated thinking I knew everything about HTML and web graphics. However I had a unique experience that enlightened me. My first job out of college was working for a place called collegestore.com. It consisted of two programmers, one customer service agent, and myself as the designer and front end coder. Granted I knew more HTML than your average “joe web designer” but I had never heard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the extent of my javascript skills was “Umm. I can do rollovers and stuff.” Even then, a lot of the time I did not know why or exactly how it worked.
Working almost exclusively with programmers at my first job gave me a much stronger appreciation for coding, the craft behind the product. As a result, I transfered a lot of my obsessive designer neuroticism into my coding. I read through my O’Reilly HTML book twice, started learning about CSS, and concentrated more than ever on my JavaScript and DHTML. More and more I wanted to learn everything I could about every bit of the process of how the web worked.
Of course I quickly realized that this would be impossible, but I was able to learn bits and pieces of many different interesting technologies. My specialty is all client-side coding but I started learning more about server-side technologies and hardware. I’ve worked with ASP and Perl, I set up my personal computer at home to run an Apache web server with PHP4/MySQL and started modifying apache modules. I built my first PC in 97 and have built or upgraded several others since then. I networked some in my house just to see if I could. I messed around with Linux and BeOS a bit too. I’m using JSP at work and PHP on my personal sites. Lately I’ve been delving into XML and XSLT but I’m still not too far into practical usage yet.
I’m not sure why this technology itch hit me, but I can’t seem to stop it and I don’t seem to care. the fact is, I’m having fun and learning new, interesting, and valuable skills while I’m doing it.
More someday...
