My Bio
I was born Andrew Arthur Green on December 19, 1976 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. I spent the first 21 years of my life living in Central Phoenix just off of Camelback Road and 35th Avenue; where I attended Sevilla Elementary School, Ventura Junior High School, and then Alhambra High School. My choice for higher education was Arizona State University in Tempe, and so I spent 4 years of my life studying to be a Computer Information Systems major in the ASU College of Business. I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems in Summer of 1999.
I met my wife, Jessica Green (Cole), in my sophomore year at Arizona State. After graduation, I spent a year working a contract web design and development position in Chandler, AZ before deciding to join Jessica in Burlington, Massachusetts. We have since moved back to Arizona, and I currently live with Jessica in a home built just for us in Gilbert with our cats Olly, Cheetoe, and Tumbleweed. I currently work in north Phoenix as a Programmer (Web) for The High-Tech Institute and have worked for HTI for the past three years.
I enjoy spending time with Jessica, playing video games (both on consoles and on the PC), designing and building web sites, as well as other forms of art such as photography.
About this Site
This site originally started out in March of 1997 as a quickly slapped together web site simply called "Andy's Homepage" that resided only in my personal web space at Arizona State University. It originally came into fruition because I created my first animated GIF for Jessica for her old web site. One thing led to another and I started dabbling in web pages and more animated GIF's. The site was originally not available to the public, as only Jessica and I had the ability to view the site while I refined it. It was several months of constant refinement before I had the courage to launch the site so that everyone could see it. My patience paid off as it was finely tuned and quite well received.
Originally the site was built with a WYSIWYG editor called Claris Home Page on my old Power Macintosh. The art was done with several Macintosh applications like Deneba Canvas 3.5, Fractal Design's Dabbler, and GIFBuilder. Since the site used to be so small, I could fit the entire site onto two 1.44 MB floppy disks. I also did not yet have home internet access so I would copy the development files from home onto floppies and upload the site using school computers connected to the net. It was also at this time that I would update the site quite frequently, often weekly with new content such as new animated GIF's.
The content of the site was mostly created as a place for fun, clean entertainment for kids. As it stands, almost all of the original sections are still intact today somewhere on the site with very few upgrades over their original versions. Once graduation from Arizona State came, it was time to move it over to my own domain and personal web site. So on June 29, 1999 FloatingCat.com was born. FloatingCat.com was chosen because "Ask the Floating Cat" was by far the most popular section of my site, and it seemed that it would be an easy name to pronounce, type, and remember. Moving to the new domain brought the ability to write my own custom Perl CGI scripts and several pages in the site rely on such scripts. My latest pages use PHP and mySQL for scripting purposes. My current website host, and a provider I'd recommend, is DreamHost, and the site is on a shared Linux server.
On a sad note, in April of 2004 the original Floating Cat, Dusty, was put to sleep due to her age. She was with my family for 16 long years, and she will be missed.
So that brings us to today. I currently use Macromedia's HomeSite 5.0 as my text editor (I do the HTML by hand now), Adobe PhotoShop CS, Adobe Illustrator CS, and Macromedia Flash MX 2004. I have tried to rebuild the site to be as clean and cross platform as possible. I think I've also finally decided to increase the default required resolution to something near 1024 x 768, as I'm sick of trying to fit everything into the 800 x 600 world of today.
Future plans call for even more dynamic content like the Flash found throughout the site, so if you have any ideas for this site, feel free to drop me a line.
Links
Below are links to sites of people I know, people who I admire, and to sites that I find amazing.
Friends
jessicagreen.com
Jessica Green is the love of my life. On her site you can read her blog, see some of her photos, and read some of her poetry.
sonoftwins.com
Eric Doolan is our primary designer at HTI, and he has done some great work. Hopefully by the time you click this link, his site will be done. I doubt it though...
joeloliveira.com
Joel Oliveira was a coworker of mine from The Screen House in Boston. He built and maintains a message board of his friends that I frequent.
Fun
homestarrunner.com
You probably already know about Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, but this site is one of my favorites of all time. The Brother's Chaps do some amazing work.
orisinal.com
Orisinal is by far the best example of experimental flash games ever.
pennyarcade.com
One of the best drawn web comics. The humor has fallen in the past few years, but still worth a visit.
