home > About Me

who am i? i'm a web designer from long island, ny, now living in the boston area.  i love music, dancing, movies, tv, surfing the internet, driving. i live in a southwest suburb of boston. i went to syracuse university's newhouse school of communications, where i majored in tv/radio/film. you might wonder how i got into web design being that i set out looking for a career in tv production or radio broadcasting.  well when i started at SU, no one knew what the internet was.  you didn't see URLs at the end of tv commercials, and you couldn't hop online to pay your bills or go shopping unless you were in the movie war games or something.  but my dad was a computer programmer, so i'd been using a computer since i was about 4.  toward the end of my freshman year i started using SU's gopher service.  it wasn't very fancy but i was amazed that you could hop on a computer and look up people and services anywhere in the country, and even connect to other schools and chat in real-time with other students.  eventually i started hearing about mosaic and the world wide web, and when i finally looked at a page in the browser, i was full of ideas for my first web page, which i created in 1995.  by the time i really got into web design i was almost done with school and i figured i'd be better off finishing up my communications program and working on websites in my spare time.  i started by desigining a website for my friends' fraternity, and a few small sites for some of my friends.

me with some of the kdr brothers - nick, greg, mark

over the years, i had visited boston a few times (and came very close to attending boston university) and decided i wanted to live there.  unfortunately it was hard convincing people that i could learn all this web programming stuff on my own without any official training, so i had some trouble finding a job in web design.  luckily my uncle jeffrey needed someone to do some web work for his company so he hooked me up with tpmc on the harbor in scituate, ma as their associate web application developer.  my main task there was to develop drinkingh2o.com, and do some work for the EPA's MAIA project. 

so let's see...now that you know who i am and what i do...what else can i tell you about me... "back to that fraternity thing," you might be thinking... while i was at SU i wound up befriending a fraternity and being officially named as their sweetheart.  now, people get all kinds of weird ideas when they hear that i have that title.  but it is nothing sketchy, just a recognition of my being a good friend to them and helping them out all the time, like a "house mom."  it was a great honor to be acknowledged and appreciated like that.  not to mention that they are a great buncha guys and i love them, they are kinda my extended family.  i also met a lot of my non-fraternity friends through them, but you can find out all about that on the friends pages.

jeremy, me, mom, dad

as for family here is the summary:  my parents, mindy and howie, were your average hippies back in the day.  they actually met when my mom was being dragged around to meet boys by my aunt sheli, and my dad was in a 70s rock band.  they later discovered that their grandfathers were best friends in college, pretty freaky huh??  my parents settled down on long island where they still live with my younger brother, jeremy. i've got a pretty big extended family with a bunch of cousins my age, my cousin jen and i are a month apart.  they used to call us "chocolate and vanilla" and you can see why! i grew up on long island.  we lived in westbury for a while, and when i was 8 we moved to syosset, your typical long island suburban half-sickeningly-rich, half-middle-class town, made famous when the legendary billy joel used our restaurant as the subject of his "scenes from an italian restaurant," when we were mentioned in such films as "soapdish" and "picture perfect," and by our famous exports, such as natalie portman and idina menzel.

jen (aka "vanilla"), saul, me (aka "chocolate")

if you've noticed a lot of references to film, that's because i LOVE movies.  i think it was meant to be, because my mom was waiting in line at the movies when i decided it was time to be born.  i was the assistant manager at the syosset triplex for a while.  that was probably the best job i ever had or will ever have (not financially speaking of course). 

i had SO much fun there.  i was basically getting paid to hang out with some of the best friends i ever had.  it's where i met my best friend maureen.  not to mention all the stories i have of run-ins with customers or strange employees.  which was partly why i became obsessed with kevin smith, the mind behind clerks.  basically if you watch that movie you'll get an idea of what it was like at the triplex.  only no one had sex with any dead people.  well, at least not that i know of.  if you are not familiar with kevin's work then go rent clerks, mallrats, chasing amy, dogma, and jay and silent bob strike back.

some of the funky stuff i have made

hmmm...what else...other random facts you might not know...hmmm... i once performed onstage at carnegie hall.  no kidding.  i went to a camp for the performing arts during my middle school years and was in the NYSSMA all-county chorus in high school... i was a dj and news anchor for my high school radio station... i was an intern on the gordon elliott show in college (yes i met him and he seemed like a very nice guy)... i used to want to be one of the fly girls from in living color... i speak spanish pretty fluently and won first place in NY in a national spanish exam...  i love candles and aromatherapy and stuff like that, which i credit my best friend maureen with getting me into!  she's also a good influence on my home-decorating... i like to make stuff, like the flower and moon incense holders you see here, or those little scented sachet things you put in your drawers so they smell all nice.  one of my masterpieces was a "buddy jesus" incense holder i made for my friend greg's birthday/christmas present.  (no, i don't worship jesus, it's an inside joke from the movie dogma.)  i also love to draw and make interesting computer-generated images, especially those funny put-your-head-on-someone-else's-body pics i have been adding to this site! i read a lot of magazines.  mostly your typical female-audience fashion mag type stuff like cosmo and mademoiselle and stuff.  i also love rolling stone, and i even had some of my comments posted in there once!

i loved beavis and butthead.  south park kinda fills the void now that they're gone tho... i love driving and road trips in my pontiac sunfire... i'm a pisces and so of course i love to be near the water, but somehow i never got too good at swimming... my favorite band ever is pearl jam (see the music page for more on that subject) but my CD collection is extremely varied in types of music.  i like so many different kinds of music, depending on my mood, but i mostly listen to alternative or modern rock, or hip-hop when i want to dance... i produced some singles for a friend's band, and worked on another friend's film when i was at SU.  i actually had a starring role in the film too but unfortunately the scene got cut (that's me on the right in my film debut!)... i love football & any major sporting events. like most LIers, i was born & raised mets-jets all the way, but now that i have been in boston a while i'm a major fan of the sox and the pats. i also still love my orangemen. it's been a good couple years with the boston championships and the NCAA championship for SU!

me and jason

thanks to the sox' historic championship season, i met my boyfriend jason on opening day 2005! we both went down to the fenway area, he and his friend actually tried to get tickets but given that it was their first opening day as champions in 86 years and they were playing the yankees, as you might guess they couldn't find any reasonable prices so they wound up watching the game nearby and i wound up there too and we started chattin... and the rest is history! he's canadian (no he does NOT say "eh"!) and grew up on a farm so our backgrounds are a bit different! but somehow we have a lot in common. we live in the same town now, about 5 minutes apart so i spend most of my time with him :)

well i guess that's about it for now.  if you want to know anything else feel free to email me!