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Where are we going, and why am I in this basket?

A site & its owner

My name is Scott, and I'm the guy who runs/owns/ruins Mexijew.com. I live, work, and play just outside of Washington, D.C. I'm a professional website designer/web accessibility & usability specialist, and have almost a decade of experience under my belt. I have owned & maintained Mexijew.com since January of 2001, but have been blogging since late 1999 (back before it became, you know, trendy). And in case you were wondering, I'm a hand-coder. To hell with WYSIWYGs.

My personal interests are (in no particular order): Writing, reading, playing musical instruments (guitar, bass, clarinet, piano), Star Trek, photography, browsing around the blogosphere, politics (as a spectator), coming up with new designs for websites that are both aesthetically pleasing and accessible, watching the Discovery Channel and Food Network, playing videogames (especially World of Warcraft, my latest addiction), and occasionally sleeping.

As I mentioned above, for almost a decade (where has the time gone?!), I have been a professional website designer in the Washington, D.C./Metro area (as I mentioned above), and have worked for large and small companies such as Sallie Mae and AWS Convergence Technologies. I was also one of the few team members at AWS that co-designed and assisted in the development of the award-winning WeatherBug application back in late 1999/2000. Currently, I'm an employee of a large US IT/Defense/R&D firm and am servicing a large-scale contract with a US Federal agency, helping them to create elegant and functional websites & web-based applications that are compliant with US Section 508 standards and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

What's a Mexijew?

A Mexijew is someone who is of Mexican and Jewish heritage. Some even say it's a racist term. That said, I'm actually NOT Mexican, although I AM Jewish. Mexijew is a nickname I picked up some years ago while working at AWS. A rather loud and offensive coworker asked if I was "a Mexican or something" because I was completing my work so quickly. I quickly retorted, "No, I'm Jewish," to which the coworker responded, "Oh, that makes you some kind of Mexijew, then, huh?" From that point on, the nickname stuck.

Colophon

Mexijew.com was designed using good old fashioned paper for the initial design. After, oh, a lot of crumpled up wads of paper, it was finally digitally drafted using Adobe Photoshop CS2 on an Apple Powerbook G4. Soon after that, it was brought into existance using Dreamweaver & Homesite (no longer "really" in existance, it's now integrated into Dreamweaver, but I keep an old copy around 'cause it's great for hand-coders like me).

The site is hosted by Flare Hosting, and was built using ASP 3.0, XHTML Transitional 1.0, CSS, with Section 508 in mind.

Thanks to StyleGala.com for some of the icons you'll see around the site.

I believe in Web Standards

And so should you. For years, folks created websites with recless abandon, not caring whether or not the site worked in most, if not all, browsers, and with multiple technology. People still do that, but good designers and developers don't. Web Standards are important, and all pages on Mexijew.com should always validate to XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS, and Section 508. If Mexijew.com doesn't look right or good on your browser, you're probably using an old computer with an old browser. Or at least an old browser, like Netscape 4.xx or IE 5.x. If that's the case, you should really go and either a) Get a new computer, or b) Download Firefox - an awesome, free, modern browser that fully supports Web Standards.

On the other hand, if you ARE using a modern browser like Firefox or IE 6.0+, let me know what the trouble is (take a screen cap in case I can't recreate the bug) and I'll try to get it resolved as quickly as possible.