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About this Site

Why is my personal site posted here and not at my place of employment, The University of Chicago?

Well, first and foremost, it is against University of Chicago policy to point a potentially commercial domain into uchicago.edu. As a result, if I want hwaet.net or hwaet.info, then the site needs to be somewhere else. Second, I want to experience what everyone else does. In other words, what is web publishing like in the "real world?" Working at a university has its advantages, but it also has downsides and one of them is that a research university tends to have many more technological options available to it (such as bandwidth and powerful web servers). Under most circumstances, this can be a good thing but in my case, it works against me. By having too much, I don't get a sense what the web is like for the general public. Therefore, I want to use a commercial ISP to keep tabs on what is going on in the outside world. Finally, if I want to link directly to Amazon.com or eBay for Kathy's publications or my auctions, I can't really do that without violating a number of institutional policies. As a result, my personal site is published off-campus.

At the moment, I am playing with a wide range of services including:

Behind the scenes, I am using iPhoto for managing the image collections an processing pictures and graphics in Adobe Photoshop CS2. Presentations come in various forms including Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and in PDF. PDFs are generally rendered directly within MacOS X with some tweaking done in Adobe Acrobat. From a code standpoint, this entire site is an ongoing project to keep me somewhat connected with Web development, and is sometimes an exercise in learning cascading style sheets (CSS).

In case you haven't guessed by now, I'm using a Mac (actually, several of them). On the road, I use a MacBook. At home, I edit graphics and work on the photo gallery on my 1.8GHz PowerMac G5, and for some things, I use my Intel iMac in the office. That doesn't mean that I don't use Windows machines; to meet some of my work needs I use an IBM ThinkPad X41 TabletPC or a Parallels virtual machine on the MacBook. Pictures are taken with whatever digital camera I have at the time, or when on the road, with my Motorola Razr mobile phone.