I've been reflecting for the past week on the why and how of what I do, as a designer and programmer, and so I've decided to write a little precis of why I'm doing this, when I could have finished business college or something. All my life, I've been in search of an audience. I've searched for the audience in a lot of ways...there's a reason why my address at every site I've been at is thespian@. I love to act, I love to write, I love to do things that get applause. On the web, I can get applause from around the world. I find that amazing. Initially, I intended to be a politician; I geared myself for that, preparing for a career in writing (in the United States, if you want to go into politics, you become a lawyer. In Canada, if you want to go into politics, you should be a journalist). As time went by, I felt that journalism was being left behind in so many ways; mainstream journalists just don't seem to 'get it' far too often. I got into self-publishing and 'zines, and correspondingly went to work at Kinko's (never underestimate the lure of an effective discount in job-hunting.). Zine work led to layout, design, and all sorts of fun stuff, and in the middle of my new fascination with computers, the web exploded. Several years before, I had gotten into programming in MOO (a virtual world), which was a great way to learn to program; at least for me. I would make the strangest toys and frippery, and people would tell me how cool it was, and use it and watch me expectantly for the next toy. I adored it; instant audience. In the process of building these useless toys (and if you can think of something less useful than an ASCII version of one of those Sliders with the 15 tabs and the empty spot that you mix up, more power to you), I learned some very good lessons about programming which I now love to use for the wider world of the web. (Also, I discovered that if you name a list Marie and a variable Donny, you can have a lot of fun looking for Donny in Marie. I get amusement in some weird places, but it keeps me happy.) So. come 1995, and I have all this content creation skill from my training in journalism, this love of programming toys and gadgets and cool things, and a large amount of layout and design work under my belt from prepress work. And the web happened, and I blossomed (I think. I feel blossomy. Are my stamens showing?). And so I started working the web using the company name Sleeping Cat. Sleeping cats have been a long term personal icon with me (there is one at my left hand and another asleep on my toes at this moment). This goes back to my SCA days, when my personal emblem thingy (I'm so heraldic), was a black cat at rest on a background of black and white checks. It then followed me through a few incarnations; whatever I've done, if it's needed a business name, the name was Sleeping Cat. When I reached the web, I thought it was very suitable: “The web is like sleeping cat...it spends two-thirds of it's time sitting quite still and paying no attention to the world around it; but when you poke it it springs into life.” Later, I will write more of my design philosophy, but I hope this has provided a little more of an idea of how I wound up here.

all images and content © 1996, 1997, 1998, sleeping cat.