Who am I?  My typical answer would be, what day of the week is it.  Today I think I'm web mistress Raven.  Which might explain why this is getting posted. : )

I am a "not-so-closet geek".  I started working with computers back in the mid '80s.  The first computer I ever used was a Macintosh.  Boy, those 3 1/2" floppy disks were cool.  It and I had the perfect relationship.  I turned it on, did my work, and turned it off.  Life with computers didn't get complicated until the early 90's.  That was when several of us decided we didn't have enough to do with college and work.  We wanted to make our mark in the comic book business.

Five of us insane people became Storm Productions.  Each of us had our forté.  The two English majors, my dearest friends Tony and Kristi, would write the stories.  The two physicists, Scott and Dave, (don't ask, all I know is they had the talent) would draw the books.  And I, being the business major, would take care of the business end.  Yeah, like this arrangement would last for long.

Tony, Kristi, and I were working full-time on our undergraduate degrees, and Scott was working on his PhD.  As if we could add more time constraints, we all worked and Tony and Kristi were expecting their first child.  Did I mention we were insane?  Since we were working with limited resources, we needed to work smarter.  We decided, if we had a couple of computers, CorelDraw 3, a scanner, and a laser printer we could computerize all the coloring and lettering.

Scott, Dave, and Tony were our computer geeks.  In my perfect little world, they would do all the computer stuff.  My little bubble was burst six months later.  Deadlines were being missed.  We needed another computer.  I bought my first computer, Clyde.  In 1992, I owned a 486DX66 with 32 MB RAM, 2MB RAM on the video card, and 590 MB of hard drive storage.  He was the envy of many people.  What the hell was I going to do with this machine?  Me, who was afraid to turn on or touch other machines.  I was going to learn how to color and letter comic book pages.  I had a blast.

But alas, all good things must come to an end.  We never made a profit on our books and about a year later, we decided to call it quits.  Graduation soon came and we went out into "the real world."  It was about this time that I discovered the World Wide Web.  Prior to that I had almost exclusively used Usenet and gopher.  The web was great!  It's funny to look at the net now compared to those early days.  The web sites were almost exclusively .edu sites and you didn't put up any type of commercial advertising or you would be flamed.  What would the web be today without commercialism?

I digress.  Life went on. Scott asked me to marry him.  I'm still not sure how I got so lucky, but I said yes!  During our first year of marriage we were separated a LOT.  We cut down on phone bills by "chatting" on the computers.  It was sometime after this that I built my first web page.  Why?  Because I could.  I had an AOL account, just built my first animated gif, and had a book on HTML.  I was set.  Not the best work I've ever seen, but I had learned how to code HTML.

And here I am today.  When I started writing this, I really didn't plan on this to become a "history of my computer experience", but that really is the backbone of who I am today and why I am doing this site.  I still have many projects on my plate.  I'm still going to school and working.  I also coerced Tony into letting Scott and me redo one of the comic books, StarLion: A Pawn's Game, and put it on the web (shameless plug for our other web site http://www.starlion.com ).  In addition to StarLion, I've been designing web sites for who ever wants me to.  Scott and I are working on getting Linux put on our machines and I'm trying to teach myself Perl.  Hopefully I will be able to put the fruits of those labors on the Web Stuff page.

Whew!  If you made it through all that you deserve a Kudo (make mine a Twix).  I hope you enjoy the site.  Drop me a line if you have any suggestions or if you just want to say hi.