prince andre's world
prince andre (named after the handsome prince of war and peace fame) was my husband's pet iguana until he passed away in the summer of 2003. when i first met my husband (KP), i told him of my intense fear of snakes and i saw him wince a bit before he dropped the bomb on me, "how do you feel about iguanas?" i didn't know how i felt since i had never been in close proximity with one, but that was all to change. prince andre, i soon learned, was a free-roaming iguana. he basically had rule of the house without a cage to close him in. KP had given him a tree to sleep in next to a window and a radiator that was warm in the winter.

i spent a good deal of time being equally enamoured and frightened of PA. he really didn't do much.. slept a lot in his tree and came down to use the bathroom on the weekends. most days he spent on the chair next to the tree, on the radiator in the winter, or on the window sill when the sun was warm. occasionally, he stopped off at the full length mirror to check out his bad self. two years went by before i even touched him. he was scaley and dry and not what i would call appealing.. in fact, he really could have done with a good facial peel and intense moisture therapy. ah, but he grew on me. i looked forward to the nightly feedings of grapes, bananas, kale that he would come down from the tree for or sometimes he would get one wiff of our chinese takeout and just have to have a veggie dumpling. when he got sick and passed away last summer, i could tell that KP was really hurt. we both cried for days. PA was a family member and he would be sorely missed.

at one point during my time with PA, i was learning illustrator and drew up a caricature of him. it sat on my hard drive for two years before being resurrected for this site. i was in need of redesigning my blog and wanted to learn CSS, XHTML, and PHP but didn't know what to do. i saw dunstan's blog and was inspired. using an XML weather feed and PHP, his site nearly mimics the weather conditions that he sees from his window in england. i remembered how PA used to love to look out the window in KP's old apartment with open eyes and a cocked head (we've since moved into a place in brooklyn together). then it came to me! i would bring PA back from the dead, so to speak, and make a virtual world for him.. a place where he could sleep in his tree or sit on the window and look at the world around him.

the script i developed pulls an XML feed from noaa.gov in order to determine the outdoor conditions. PA's world is entirely perfect, you see. when it rains, it never floods. when it snows, everything becomes white until the weather clears and then BOOM! everything's green and new again. no need to ever plow the streets around this joint. his movements are different depending on the outside temperature, the time and date, and on the weekend he even leaves to go to the bathroom. i also factored in his little mice friends (watch out for chappatsu nezumi! they're fast!) which KP and i were sure he was in cahoots with. KP's old place was infested with the little buggers.. cute, yes. hygenic, no. anyway, eventually, i may give more randomness to the scripts, but for now, i'm happy just to see him everyday again.

about me
in 2000, i left my entire life behind in michigan and moved to new york and have not wanted to live anywhere else since. now, i'm installed in brooklyn with my wonderful husband where we spend most of our time on our big black couch. i work for a large media/entertainment company in midtown where i code for the corporate website. it's my job to be online, to be in the know, to live outside of the box when it comes to technology and i do that by spending a lot of time researching what other people and companies do. i couldn't ask for a better job.

when i started this blog, i didn't have much to talk about. i really only installed the darn software so that i could experiment with it for a freelance client of mine. really, i thought blogging was sort of weird. who wanted to know my opinion anyway? you know what they say about opinions and assholes right? well, i'll be damned! blogging ain't so bad! in fact, if it weren't for blogs, i think that the internet may have stagnated two or three years ago. an immense amount of interesting and cool technology has come about from blogging and bloggers, and i'm proud to say that gleek.net has become a veritable testing ground for all the fun things that have made it to my company's website. testing out my skills here first was one of the best ideas i've ever had.

the content of this blog has changed considerably as well. though i still like to talk about my interests and, well, me, i have really started focusing on my creative side. a year ago, i hit a real slump. being on the computer is a lot of fun, but when you do it all day you don't necessarily want to jump on your computer when you get home at night. i've never been good at drawing or painting and my sewing skills were meager but i wanted to make things! things that did not involve my computer! i learned to knit and it changed my life. really. it did. i made a scarf, then a hat, then jumped on the sock bandwagon and the entire time i had my blog to show it all off on (see? my computer and my knitting could work together! it's nice they get along.) through my blog, i met other bloggers who knit both here in the states and abroad. then, through a lucky turn of events, i met some cool girls in new york who blog and knit as well! the rest is history (or it's in the archives, at least.) so, though the blog has been taken over by knitting, it still includes stuff about TV, books/reading (i started another blog to cover my reading habit), crafting (all types of fun stuff), the lovely harry potter, and all other personal interests. sorry if that bores you but, hell, it's my site anyway.

also, i'm studying up on good grammar and english skills and this is where i intend to practice. i use far too many periods (so good punctuation is a top priority) and i want to work on completing my thoughts. for once. right now, i do not capitalize. in formal letters, i do. in company briefs, yes. internet and email get none of that from me. i've become internet lazy.

i'm also a japanese student. wow, sometimes i wonder where i find the time to do all this stuff! i'm still trying to figure out how to blog in both english and japanese (if anyone can help me, please contact me!) i take classes at the japan society in midtown. i love japanese. taking another language has taught me so much about my own. i highly recommend second languages. if you can do it, please do.

for those of you who are interested, i spend a lot of time working on this website and keeping it fresh and new. i change the design when i learn new techniques and many of my choices are based upon the designs that i see on other blogs. how many other blogs do i read? well, too many, actually. i recently had to switch over to following RSS feed-enabled sites only because i just didn't have the time or patience to click through every blog in my bookmarks folder. so, i'm including my blogroll on this page in case you're in the need of some new blogs to read.

about this site
i follow a good many blogs, as you can see above, and get hardly anything done. i've been an "internet programmer" (which is the term i like to use now with "internet publishing" or an oldie-but-goodie "design technologist".. i try to keep the word "web" out of everything) since 1998. i like my job. i like coding. it can be very zen to get a site up and running and looking pixel perfect against the design that was handed to me. until recently, all of my design execution took place with tables. i'm a master at putting a website together using tables and spacer/transparent gifs. i know all the ins and outs of making a design work with no stylesheet placement, but now, it's become a severe burden to keep coding this way. first of all, building with tables is bulky. the k-weight of a page becomes an enormous bandwidth hog. i used to think, though, that this was the only real way to build something that would be pixel perfect and last. not anymore.

gleek.net is built with CSS (stylesheets) and XHTML only. it was my goal to build the entire thing without one table and here it is! my goal accomplished. i won't go into all of the specifics about why using CSS and XHTML is better. it's a matter of adhering to web standards and delivering the trimmest, easiest to display site possible. if you're interested in learning more about web standards, you should pick up a book that was recommended to me by mattymcg called Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman. it's a concise read with no BS. be sure to pick it up.

this site is constructed with a Mac (Powerbook G4 running OS X) mainly in BBEdit. for the photo gallery, i use iPhoto with an online gallery called (incidentally) Gallery (which in its current state does not use CSS for layout. a pity but it's what i have to work with.) i primarily use my brand new casio exilim 7.0 megapixel camera (with my trusty ol' leica digilux 1 as backup.) i'm a serious photoshop user. been using it since 1997 and it gets better every year. the blogging tool is Moveable Type which is easy to install and very powerful. no blog would be complete without it.

blogroll
i've decided to sub-divide up my blogs for easier viewing...