I am a young woman with both technical and artistic aspirations. Here is the professional version if you don't care about my hobbies. If you need to contact me, please email sitarah at this domain.

I like to create the following:

• Contradictions

  I am a female programmer. I have degrees in both Computer Science and Literature -- earned at the same time -- from a tech school. I am an internet addict, but I won't watch TV or play video games. I have a robotic dinosaur, but I can make own cheese, bread, and jam. I enjoy both cute AND uglyoverload.com.

• Answers

  At the interview for my first post-college job, I told my future boss that I loved data. That's still true today -- I am excited by the idea that in those 5-lb reports or this patched-together database server, there are insights just waiting to be discovered by someone who has the time, inclination, and vision. I am okay if that person is not me, as long as I can help it be you. To those ends, I've built search apps, automated reports, interfaces, and mashups to roll up and recombine data into some kind of clearer picture. I see automation as an extension of this goal -- if I can free up my coworker by automating some of their tedious copy-paste work, then they have more time to think about my data. (I like to think I've also made them happier and less bored.)

  I've been on the other side, too -- the analyst and the marketer, providing my own answers. I couldn't say which I preferred more.

• Photos

  Photography is a lifelong passion. I started with film cameras from a young age, but the cost of film, development, and even disposables was prohibitive. My Polaroid digicam, bought in December 2000, was beautiful freedom. It ate batteries like Firefox eats RAM, but it was still so much cheaper. I never looked back. Since then, I've taken over 3,000 digital pictures worth keeping.

  Today, I carry at least one camera everywhere. Sometimes I have two, further weighing down a purse that is already a Duracell graveyard. I try to go somewhere new every weekend so I can increase my Flickr count. Consequently, I've discovered a lot of my homestate, New Jersey, from behind a lens.

  That said, while I love photography, I am not an expert that can turn a picture of a towel into a compositional study of color and texture. I realize that everyone takes pictures -- good ones -- of mountains, flowers, lakes, and cake, so I'm not doing anything difficult by taking a good scenic shot. However, difficult or not, I *like* mountains, flowers, lakes, and cake. Especially cake. Who has time for towels when there's a beautifully plated dessert nearby?

• Artwork

  My best work involves photorealistic charcoal portraits, usually of women. I've been working in black and white for years, but did my first full-color picture in December 06. I also have a long background in digital art, having started drawing Sailor Moon pictures in MS paint at the wee age of 12. I've graduated to Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Illustrator since then. While I have made digital art from scratch, most of my work involves photo touch-up these days.

• Clothing

  Most notably, I sewed, from scratch and by hand, a floor-length, white velvet gown to wear to the Return of the King premiere. Yes, I dressed up as an elf. It was awesome.

  I've also made regular clothes, curtains, cloaks, and stuffed animals. I'd like to make a purse some day, but I've patched up leather bags for friends and had a very sore hand to show for it.

• Stories

  I didn't like the children who lived nearby when I was young, so I spent a lot of time alone and writing. I had multiple page stories by age 8 and ambitiously started my first novel at 10. It was a parable on the danger of lies, told in a framework of mermaids and Atlantis. Deep, right? Word Perfect unfortunately scuttled the project by corrupting my full outline. Bastards.

  Despite this inauspicious start, I continued writing, branching out to all kinds of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and documentation. I received a "graduate certificate" in business and technical writing to bridge my two bachelor degrees. Currently, I put this to - paid - use by writing proposals, competitive analyses, product reviews, and movie spoilers every so often.

  If you see any English mistakes in these pages, it is purely ironic.

• Games

  Alas, when I say games, I do not mean Grand Theft Auto or Wii Bowling. Having played both GTA and Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, I am abysmal at both. Frankly, I can barely drive an arcade car. I'm thinking my skills peaked when I got to level 3 of Sonic Spinball in 1995.

  That said, I really enjoy text games. Yes, those quaint relics with neither graphics nor a controller -- MUDs. I love to read, and having new material to read every day as people did new things perfectly suited my insatiable appetite. I played one well-known MUD for 4 years, then became an administrator for the next 3 years. Eventually, I was in charge of world-building, scripting, and being one of less than 20 people responsible for entertaining more than 500 players. After I left that place, I resolved not to MUD again, but some day I like to think of starting my own.

  I also like flash games like orisinal.com's, and this was my sole motivator for learning flash. That, and the tantalizing possibility of making music videos with dancing kittens. A flash video even inspired my first attempt at sewing a stuffed animal.

• Food

  Food is one of my favorite things to photograph. I know people have a built-in reaction to certain foods, and it interests me how they might project that -- or their hunger -- onto an image.

  I also like food a lot, to my ongoing annoyance. I cook daily, but it's nothing that's interesting or exceedingly tasty. I have lost and kept off most of 100 lbs, but the price is extreme precision in weighing and selecting my dinner.

  Because I cook to extremely healthy specifications on the weekdays, my partner and I go out every Saturday so he can get some artery-clogging crap into his diet. His love of comfort food leads to my surplus of oversized, beautifully-plated dessert photos. My art is piggybacking on his cholesterol level.

• Websites

  I handle both the front and back end of websites, using LAMP and CSS. (I dislike Java, and I make fun of Ruby on Rails.) This means I literally build sites from conception to realization -- I own my own server, do my own designs, do all the coding and installation, then do marketing if I care to.

  I've technically been doing it since I was ~12, which is over 10 years now, but that's a long story, riddled with mentions of Sailor Moon and geocities. Since then, I've made a few sites appealing to people aged above 16:

  • factvsfact, a site showing two random statistics, then asking you to choose which is more interesting to you
  • stealmydesktops, providing free high-res scenic photos
  • icouldtakeyou, a site showing two people and asking you to choose who would win in a fight
  • whatidoallday, a joint project with Louis which collected submissions from people about what they actually did at their jobs
  • myfaithinhumanity, a news aggregator concentrating on 'happy'/uplifting stories

  I'm working on:

  • MaybeYouHeard.com, a free web hosting site built with my partner
  • Mudmeeter.com, which attempts to connect gamers who want to meet up
• Scrapbooks

  I have saved:

  • nearly every receipt to every restaurant I go to.
  • every IM passed between my partner and I for the six months after we met.
  • the business cards from every interview I've been on.
  • my old parking tickets.

  I save everything, and it's all in my scrapbook. It is both a memorial and an alibi.