A Little About Michael Huch
There's nothing particularly entertaining to fill this space. I'm sure I've lead a rather typical life, filled with childhood, public schools, work, and probably a mid-life crisis sometime down the way. I suppose I could tell the story of how I managed to transport myself from the midwest to the west coast with a 1991 Ford Festiva (and when that died, an '81 VW Rabbit) at the ignorant age of 19, but I think I'll save that story for its own article and inflate my perceived content. Oh man that'll be sweet.
So I do web design. Or maybe I should refer to it as web development. I'd like to say I'm a graphic artist, but you definitely don't want those guys on your case for defamation. Luckily for me, the proliferation of browser incompatibility hijinks has made the ability to paint a canvas with semantically correct HTML tags and then pretty it up with a dab of CSS a moderately valuable commodity.
Plus I have this edge, and that edge is called "passion". I actually like doing this. It's great, because I know how to. Really convenient. I've always been fascinated by the web and how everyone can have their own soapbox. That fascination in 1998 lead me to want to make my own site. I used Netscape Composer, possibly one of the worst WYSIWYG editors of all time. It wasn't until my pages started getting too large and bogging down my computer's 133 MHz Pentium processor that I realized I had to actually start getting my hands dirty with the HTML. So what did I use instead?
Microsoft Excel and a template from the web. Meanwhile I figured out how to create a text drop shadow effect in Microsoft Paint in what would be my only creative input. But then I got into the HTML (seriously this time) and managed to even jump on the Cascading Stylesheets bandwagon a little early. Then when my personal site became too large to manage I acquired a book on PHP and MySQL and now I know those too! Believe it or not, this site was written from scratch in PHP. I don't believe it. Me neither.
So this is what seven years of dabbling in non-professional web design'll get you. The site you see here, for better or worse. I've put a decent amount of care into it though, so I hope you appreciate all the little perks and easter eggs as much as I enjoyed spending the hundreds of hours agonizing over them.
In the little spare time I have, I will typically be found in front of the computer. Sometimes I feel like the word "fun" has lost all meaning to me, and from an external viewpoint you'd be likely to agree. I sit in front of the computer and tinker away, going all night if I could. The computer is like an ecosystem that I preside over as some kind of diety. I maintain the order and I create the chaos. Ah, creation. It is the beauty of the computer that I can create an infinite amount of intangible, complex organisms, be they webpages, music, images, or essays. The computer provides numerous creative outlets to build information that can be effortlessly stored and organized for future use. I have two loves in my life, my girlfriend and my computer. Probably in that order.
In my youth I was a video game fanatic. I couldn't begin to understand why adults were so indifferent to them. I thought I would never get tired of them. Perhaps not for the same reasons, but video games are not nearly the draw they once were for me. I find the majority of them to be predictable, poorly designed and balanced, and overall boring. As a kid you don't seem to notice the underlying devices in place, the senseless goals that seek only to create gameplay in spite of logic. If you're in a gigantic factory and you find a locked door, are you going to scour the entire factory for this hidden key. Sounds like a great way to kill an entire day. Extra annoyance points when the door is rickety and would react like a dandelion if you so much as blew on it.
So I've raised my expectations a bit. What's wrong with that? So I like video games. This is the "About Mike" section and I'm telling you about Mike. I'm a big fan of realistic first person shooters and console multiplayer games. To give you an idea of what I play, some of my favorite games of late are:
- Operation Flashpoint
- Half-Life 1/2
- Ninja Gaiden (XBOX)
- Truck Dismount
- Tony Hawk Pro Skater
- Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing
- Scattergories (Technically, I just said games)
You may have noticed my activities are largely indoor. It's true that I'm generally not a fan of leaving the house. Going out to social gatherings has little draw for me when I can socialize with people I like where I live. I don't really get along with most people, and it's not due to friction or anything of the sort, rather people in general seem to operate on a different level than where I'm at. All I can say is that I'm not a big fan of small talk and shallow pleasantries. Tell me what you think, not what you think I want to hear. In some cases I'll actually dislike people because they're unrealistically nice and it makes it difficult to trust them without being exposed to their true feelings.
I'm also a big fan of music. Unlike anyone else in the world ever! In general I'm a fan of music that provides sounds and structures I've never heard before. For a bit more of an idea of my listening habits, you can peruse my Audioscrobbler page for a list of pretty much every MP3 in my Winamp playlist. Much of my music library is in WMV format to conserve space and Audioscrobbler won't reflect those unfortunately.
This miniature auto-biography amounts to roughly a beta. It will surely be rewritten and rewritten, but for now it will suffice as a primer to the world of Mike. Hope you enjoy the site.