Who am I?

Hah. Good question! My name is Claire. I’m 24, I’m in that rare breed of girls who are also geeky, and I live in Indiana. I suppose that gets the basics out of the way.

I’m atypical in just about every way. I’m a girl, but I’m not a girly girl (or butch). I’m a Christian (mostly), but I don’t swallow whatever a preacher tells me just because he says he knows what the truth is. This doesn’t mean I’m a liberal Christian who attempts to reinterpret the Bible to say what I want it to say - it just means that I’d rather investigate something for myself than have it shoved in my face.

I’m a conservative Republican, which I’m sure will thrill plenty of people. I’m adamantly against socialism, because I believe that people should work for what they want - and that we can’t base our laws on the exception to that rule. However, I’m also not one of those types who randomly accepts whatever Bill O’Reilly or Ann Coulter happen to be saying at the moment. I actually give logical and objective consideration to what I think, and it’s worked out for me so far.

I have two cats named Sumi and Ninja. Sumi’s about three years old and is an absolute trip. She plays fetch, follows me around the house, and comes when I call her. She’s a total attention whore and is very skilled at playing the “my-owner-hates-me-please-please-take-me-home” card on complete strangers. I adopted Ninja in August 2008 as a playmate for Sumi. She’s about six months old and still very kitten-like compared to Sumi. They play together, and Ninja’s favorite game is to find Sumi, hold her down, and force-groom her.

My music and movie tastes are wildly varied. If you don’t like what I like, or you like what I hate, that automatically means you suck and I rule. That’s how the game works - I don’t make the rules; I just enforce them.

I’m a Grammar Nazi™. To an extreme. I don’t tolerate bad grammar or spelling from anyone, unless English is very obviously not your first language. I take full liberty to edit any comments on my posts in order to correct flagrant errors and/or stupidity. I sometimes make exceptions for hanging prepositions, as sentences sometimes sound awkward written any other way.

What do I do?

I graduated from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in May 2006 with a degree in Computer Information Technology from Purdue. Not knowing what I actually wanted to *do*, I ended up working for about two years at Cummins Inc. (formerly Cummins Engine Company) as a sort of project manger and support manager. After working there for a couple years, I realized that my true calling was web development. I started looking for work, without much success.

In February 2008, I started dating a guy who lived in West Lafayette. That didn’t work out (on so many levels), but visiting him several times got me thinking about moving out of Indianapolis. Until then, I’d only really thought about living in Indy. In fact, at that point I was literally days away from making an offer on a nice condo on the near North side. I figured I’d just always live in Indy - it’s where I grew up, some of my family was there, and it was familiar.

However, finding work as a web developer isn’t that easy, especially since I didn’t actually have any formal experience, aside from one three-month summer internship at Cummins in 2005. When I looked at what might be available at Purdue University, I was faced with a good number of positions for which I was actually qualified. I ended up getting an interview (and subsequent offer) to work within the Teaching & Learning Technologies division of Purdue’s IT department (ITaP, or “IT at Purdue”). I’ve been there since mid-April 2008, and so far am not regretting the decision.

My group largely works with Adobe Coldfusion and Microsoft SQL Server. I never touched CF before I showed up at Purdue. It’s one insanely easy language to learn, fortunately. I don’t think I’d have such luck with Java or ASP.NET with C#. I’m not much of a true programmer, and I’ll be the first to agree that web development is not even close to the complexity found in actual software and application development.

I have a bizarre love for SQL and databases. Nothing makes me happier than writing long, boring, and complex SQL queries.

Seriously.

What do I have?

Herpes.

I kid, I kid. I’m laughing as I write that.

Sorry. I’ll be serious now. I’m a hardcore computer geek. I used to just be into the software/OS side, but I’ve become more of a hardware geek lately. I own several computers, and lots and lots of peripherals.

I have a Dell PowerEdge 400SC that serves as my home desktop computer. It’s old, but it does what I want, and I’ve found little reason to replace it yet. It’s got a 2.8GHz Intel Northwood P4 with Hyperthreading technology, 2GB DDR SDRAM, and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. It also cost me next to nothing to get, because of the pricing and buyback opportunities at the time. I had to replace the motherboard last year due to that faulty capacitor issue to which Dell (among many others) fell victim, so it now thinks it’s a Precision 360 workstation.

I also a Dell XPS M1330. It’s actually Purdue University property, as it’s my work laptop. I’ve had it for a week, and it’s going to seriously pain me to give it back. It’s got a 2.6GHz Intel T9300 Core2Duo with 6MB cache, the 128MB nVidia GPU upgrade, and a 0.3MP webcam. I love it, but I don’t use it as frequently as I used to…

…because I am now the proud owner of an Acer Aspire One! I have the 160GB HDD/1GB RAM model, and I love it. I use it constantly (much more frequently than my old Asus eeePC 701). The keyboard is the perfect size, the screen is big enough for browsing and chatting (and even a little light Photoshop and Office work), and it’s great for playing the old DOS games I love so much.

On top of all that, I currently own three Apple G3 iBooks - two clamshells and one 12″ white model. I had two, but I managed to accidentally short the battery contacts on the other one, and the motherboard melted. All these parts are the result of an ongoing project I started in August 2006 to mod my original 300MHz tangerine clamshell. I’ve since managed to upgrade the motherboard to the 466MHz model with firewire, add a CD-RW/DVD combo drive, and upgrade the LCD from the shitty 800×600 (SVGA) stock to a much-more-functional 1024×768 (XGA). I use my iBook sometimes to play games, mess around with OS X, and keep track of a few documents that, for reasons unknown to even me, I keep on my iBook.

The other two are models that I still need to finish refurbishing so I can sell them on Craigslist or eBay. I’ve been too busy (that’s geek speak for “too lazy”) to work on that project for several months, though.

I also have lots of peripherals. My favorites include my Logitech MX700 and G5 mice, my Logitech Orbit AF webcam, and my HP LaserJet 2100tn printer - that’s “n” as in networking. JetDirect is possibly the awesomest thing to come from computer technology since the Start button. I love my printer. So sue me.

I’m also a bit of a wannabe gamer and have a Dreamcast with a single game, a PlayStation 2 with a lot of games (Katamari Damacy and Soul Calibur FTW), a Wii, and a DS Lite that I use far more frequently than I expected when I originally bought it.

Conclusion

I’m awesome. That is all.