Alphabet Books
I have always loved alphabets and alphabet books and books of alphabets. I talked myself into Elliot Offner's fantastic Introduction to Typography class in 1993, where I set, printed, and bound twelve copies of a An Alphabet of Nursery Rhymes. I learned so much from this class and had so much fun doing it.
At the end of that decade, when I was a travelling consultant, touring the hotel rooms of American cities, I captured a little bit of the same magic when I began my series of digital alphabets.
I can't resist a good alphabet book at auctions, and I can't bring myself to sell the box of foundry broadsheets I got several years ago. I've bought a number of these abedaria, but one of the coolest was a palm-sized antique alphabet book, an 1844 reprint of a 1694 Primer - and put it on-line.
Ancient Studies
My undergraduate major in college was Ancient Studies, an interdisciplinary major. The focus of my coursework was the art, literature, and popular culture of Provincial Rome. I was particularly interested in the Italian towns, where change in social hierarchy, power, and culture can be seen in the broad tapestry of their times, and the non-Roman cultures. As a major, it prepared me well for my future life, which always seems to boggle folks. But I developed a variety of ways to look at information, parse it, combine, and synthesize it. Translation, interpretation, documentation, commentary: these are all things that translated perfectly to later life.
Ancient World Web
The most famous of my web pages, the Ancient World Web was an index that aimed to provide broad coverage of sites relating to the Ancient World - all cultures, all time periods before roughly 1000 A.D. It inspired my most depressing email: Reams of requests to do someone's (or someone's kid, far too often) homework or to mail/fax/FedEx them "everything about the Renaissance" or "everything [I] know about Ancient Rome." I loved many of the folks I got to know during that decade - content providers, indexers, enthusiasts. I ended up having to shutter because it was a full-time job just to manage it (and I had another - paying - full-time job that demanded my attention).
Anecdote
An anecdote lived on the front page of the Alphabet for months and months; lots of people linked to it, blah blah blah short-lived meme blah blah blah. I don't even know what this refers to any more. At some point, I must have decided to not resurrect that page, which means that my minor infamy will recede into the shadows, lost in the shadows of time. Whoo-hoo?
Animated Gifs
Up until the last few years or so, I could still count on one hand the number of useful animated .gifs I'd seen, and there aren't that many more that really impressed me. Naturally, in 1997, I decided to create the world's largest animated .gif (287k) as a sort of introduction to me/ (if that was indeed a record, it didn't last long!) in an effort to explain myself. So very 1996! Oddly, in this modern age of whizz-bang movement, animation, there has been an upswing in useful, utile animated gifs out there: informative and appropriate for the medium. It pleases my inner grump.
Antiques
I like old things. I like the design and the structure, the history and view into a world past, the practical and the ridiculous. I used to sell them for a living, but now I dabble in collecting.Apple Macintosh
Although most of my professional career has been spent on Windows-compatible machines, I have been a Mac girl since I was ... well, a girl. I can still remember when we got that Macintosh SE. We'd had Compaqs and other IBM-compatibles (as they were called in those days) and a TRS-80 before that, but the Macintosh SE was a revelation. It let me be super-creative and digital right from the get go, and that OS is still my preferred tool, even with their crappy cords and weird decisions.
Asparagus
I can't stand the stuff. I dislike the texture even more than the taste. I dislike them more than carrots.
Auctions
The curious thing about auctions (at least the ones I attend!) is how your frame of refence changes - all of a sudden, things you'd spend 30 bucks for in a store aren't worth upping your bid to $12, and things you'd never normally consider buying become attractive at $1 or $10 or $25. I love auctions, both for finding treasures and for people watching. I love a good deal and I love a good treasure, and when the two combine paths ... It's a thrill.
Australia
I lived in Australia for about ten months when I was twelve, and I loved it. We lived right on the beach - one half mile north brought us to a great fruit market, one half mile south to the rock reefs and the places we bought our kilos of ham and cheese and bread. I have fond memories of the sand and the bus, the cockatoo down the street and the ferry to the city, the library and the harbor. I still count Sydney among my favorite cities, and the Great Barrier Reef as an extraordinary experience.
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is clearly one of the greatest books ever written, but I prefer Persuasion. Heresy!