about – 2005

31 Dec 2005 in journal

hi, i’m andrea hull. a moody, vegetarian, polyglot, pisces, 27 year old, middle child, introvert, 5’3” bibliophile.

i’m also a grad student at the department of information studies at ucla. i’m taking it slowly and thinking of graduating not within the normal two year, but maybe two and a half years. now that our new governor has passed a bill augmenting graduate fees for next year by 20%, i’m not so sure.

since november 2002 i’ve been working at the pacifica radio archives in different capacities and constantly changing schedules. right now, and really for the last year or so, i’ve been the unofifical webmaster, doing odds and ends cataloging (especially of democracy now!, pacifica’s flagship program), as well as a whole lot of researching, organizing and assisting in lots of different projects. i’m still a temp at the archives ~ and and have alternately been called “production assistant”, “assistant cataloger” and credited with “web design”. hmpfh.

when not working or at school, you’ll find me home sweet home! home is a teeny apartment in koreatown with a loud street just outside my windows, bad pipes, and faulty electricity, but i love it. home is also sometimes maryland, just a few miles from the potomac river (that’s where i grew up and all my family is still there).

i used to be pretty involved in activist stuff, but since starting school this past year, and even before, once i moved into this apartment by myself, i pretty much dropped all the other groups and meetings. i feel a little guilty sometimes but mostly i’m glad to be done with the tedious meetings, annoying pontificating jerks, paranoia, socially-inbred cliques, and overall failure to really accomplish anything (the one exception: la food not bombs).

i love to read, eat carbs and grease, shower, play with my cats, dress up, go to sleep, play with little kids, make stuff, and laugh. i’m not very good at being happy on a regular basis, expressing myself beyond simplicities, reading non-fiction, keeping to to-do lists, excercising regularly, keeping in touch, or keeping my temper. i’m also a pretty agressive driver, i’m afraid ~ all my repressed anger just bubbles up and i start cussing and feeling really competitive. also, i always have lots of library fines and am overall a pretty dirty person. but, though this may seem a contradiction, i think i am getting better and better all the time (knock on wood).

a great philosophy: “first, do no harm.”

mini-colophon(ish):

hard & software

• » a mac 15” powerbook
• » bbedit
• » kodak easyshare cx6330

applications & code bits

• » oddbook
• » gallery
• » hiveware’s image rotator

web help

• » w3schools & html goodies
• » all the webdesign, css, ia, etc. links found on my links page
• » and just for fun, favicon tutorial, using photoshop

putting it all together

• » now i use the excellent textpattern, but before i tried ‘rolling my own’ so to speak, and did pretty nicely if i may say so myself, using the following:
• » atomz, for free searching
• » for commenting, first i tried symbio (commenting cgi script – it’s great and open source!) but it was a little overkill for me, so i set up dotcomments, which worked fine and needs no sql databases or weird cgi-stuff, i.e. it’s very easy (and fully customizable)!