required field -- about

required field -- a personal weblog
The required field serves as my daily journal, for things that I feel strongly or not so strongly about.
It's about family.
It's about politics.
It's about life.
It's about fly fishing.
It's a soapbox from which I spew.
It's my own personal press conference.

Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong.
Sometimes it's maddening, sometimes it's funny.
Sometimes it's boring, sometimes it's not.
You get what you get, and take away what you will.
This is for me, not for you, but you can come along for the ride, as long as you sit in the back and shut up.

a brief history
This site started life in 1997, and has gone through many iterations, names and servers, most of which have been thankfully lost to the trash on 44MB Syquest drives, zip disks and floppies throughout the years. Mostly it was a resume site but once in awhile I would change the design to reflect the latest developments. I don't think I ever put auto playing midi songs on my site, but I did have the animated gifs for mail links and the under construction graphics that never really went away.

It's current incarnation came about in early 2000, when I first heard about this "new thing" called blogs. I don't remember where I began to see what it meant, probably at kottke.org, but I could be wrong. I figured I'd try it out, I mean how hard could it be right? Just write some funky thing every day.

So I went to blogger.com to create a "'blog" and begin documenting my life in electronic form for the entire world to see. As I was filling out the form, it asks for a title for your weblog. I had no clue what it was going to be called. I had no clue what I was going to write about. One of the fields had a required field label, and I thought, "Why not." I think I made it for about a week and I never wrote more than about 3 sentances at a time. Finally I just dropped it completely.

A year passed, almost to the day and I thought I'd give it a go again. I have been posting almost daily for about 7 months or so. I even went so far as to create my own blogger application, and my own database. Who knows what the future holds....

a brief history of me
I am an Interaction Designer for IDEO. My corporate bio reads:

Mark Chance is the principal web developer and Interaction Designer in IDEO's Palo Alto office. He is responsible for everything from feasibility studies to end-to-end solution deployment for IDEO's clients.

Mark brings with him a multidisciplinary background as a graphic designer and computer programmer. He has been working in the digital realm for nine years, and developing for the web for four years. Mark has also contributed articles to several leading web technology publications.

Expertise includes ASP, ADO, VBScript, JavaScript, HTML, DHTML, JSP, XML, XSL, WML, VisualBasic, C++, and Java programming as well as technology consulting and feasability analysis.

My personal bio reads:

I was born.
I went to school.
I went in the Army.
I fought in a war.
I got married.
My wife and I had a son.
I work.
I fish.

Maybe I'll get around to writing this some day.



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copyright © 2001 by Mark Chance