The best way to learn all about me is to click on the pictures on my home page. This will open up slideshows containing even more pictures. The old cliché is true - A picture is worth a thousand words. But if you don't have the time or the inclination to go through those slide shows, then here is a thumbnail sketch of me and my history. I was born in the summer of 1975. I lived the first 18 years of my life in the town of West Newton, Pennsylvania, which is about 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. I went to school at West Newton Elementary, then Yough (pronounced "Yok") Junior High, and then Yough Senior High. I graduated in 1993 and was the class salutatorian. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh, main campus, where I majored in physics. I graduated with a B.S. in physics in 1997 and went to graduate school at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I received my M.S. in physics in 2001, and I successfully defended my Ph.D. in August, 2005. While at Rice, I was involved in a number of extracurricular activities. I performed five times in Rice's annual Shakespeare production, known as "Baker Shake". I worked two years at the Rice student radio station, KTRU, and was program director for one of those years. I taught undergraduate tutorials and labs nearly every year of my graduate student career (the Rice physics program only requires graduate students to teach during their first 3 years). In January 2006, shortly after graduating from Rice, I started working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laser and Optics Research Center at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. My research there involves studying the frequency conversion, i.e. color-changing, of laser light. As for my personal life, I have never been married, and I have no children. I have one brother, named Joe, and one sister, named Patience. I am a Sherlock Holmes buff, and I used to be a movie buff, but not so much anymore. I own a ukelele but haven't learned to play it. I like old jazz and doo-wop music. My favorite TV shows are Veronica Mars and The Amazing Race. My favorite websites are Television Without Pity and Slate. Since moving to Colorado, I have become an avid hiker and mountain-climber.
After defending my Ph.D., I decided to learn more about website programming. My goal was to use all of my website design knowledge and resources to try to make the most elaborate site I could in a period of several weeks. This website is the result. All of the coding for the website is done with XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. In January 2007, I upgraded my Diary page with Movable Type, a blog publishing interface. XHTML is a more standardized form of HTML, the language traditionally used to create web pages. The use of XHTML has been advocated by the World Wide Web Consortium, often abbreviated as W3C. W3C's purpose in pushing for this standardization is to allow web pages to be displayed the same way on all computers and all browsers and, as mobile phones, digital assistants, televisions, and video game systems are now increasingly able to access web pages, on all digital devices. So, XHTML is the next step toward web page programming for the future. Cascading Style Sheets are also an improvement over older methods of web programming. They enable you to use an external document to handle web page layout and formatting. There are several advantages to doing things this way. You can simultaneously change the layout of many web pages by editing just one document, as opposed to having to change the code of every single page, and style sheets are, in general, much more flexible than HTML in handling web page layout. I don't know much about JavaScript, but I used several pre-written scripts for mouse rollover effects. In creating this website, I used several books for reference; they are listed below.
1. Castro, E., HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th ed., (Peachpit Press, Berkeley, 2003).
2. Nettleton, N., Web Design Expert, (Friedman/Fairfax, Cambridge, 2002).
3. Niedherst, J., Learning Web Design, 2nd ed., (O'Relly, Beijing, 2003).