Jason
Email: (link disabled)
Location: Missouri, United States
(website programmer)

On This Site

I live in small-town, middle-class U.S.A. so I haven't much personal experience with poverty. But I am seriously troubled seeing blatant wastes of money on television, as though Americans don't recognize that there's a poverty problem and don't have the least bit of benevolence. I see rock stars dressed in ugly, uncomfortable $10,000 clothes smashing $10,000 guitars on stage for fun, and I think, "He could have bought a decent guitar, jeans, and a T-shirt for about $215.99. That means he just wasted $19,784.01 that he could have given to a charity or something, but chose instead to use it to make himself look like an idiot on national television. $19,784.01 buys a lot of bread in Somalia. Examples of wasted money like this are all around, and they really annoy me.

Americans in general don't seem to realize that people in other countries are human. The Serbian army shoots Kosovar women and children by the hundreds, but when did our nation's attention really turn to the crisis? When three American soldiers were taken prisoner. That's a tragedy, but isn't the slaughter of innocent civilians also a bit disturbing? I don't like how the media's attention focuses on Americans as though they're more important than people in other countries.

If I was to summarize this site in two words, they would be, "WAKE UP!" I want people to realize what's going on, because a lot of Americans have the means to help and simply don't. I want a lot of people to see this site, so that maybe some of them who don't understand what's going on under the poverty line might begin to. So send your friends emails about it. Heck, even send those dreaded ICQ chain messages! Just get the word out!

My main contribution to the site has been the Dynamic HTML in the interactive section, though I've helped nitpick through the details of the design and spiff up the other pages a bit. I spent last summer teaching myself DHTML and now I've found a great way to put it to use. Hopefully my special effects will draw the eyes of some who would have otherwise ignored the site's message.

Biography

I'm eighteen years old and I live in Kirksville, Missouri, for now. I'm just graduating from high school and in fall of '99 I'm going to enter Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to study astronomy. Then I'm going to go to grad school and study astronomy. Then I'm going to be an astronomer. I would like to be the first human to set foot on Mars. Besides Elvis, that is.

I'm kidding, of course. I hope to set foot on Mars well before Elvis.

That brings me to another of my hobbies: humor writing. By the time you read this, I'll probably have organized my writing, humorous and otherwise, on my personal homepage at (link disabled). My other hobbies include tennis, fishing, and web programming (professionally – for a couple of design firms) and watching Frasier once a week. There's no really clean way to end a quick biographical blurb like this, so I'll just leave you with the knowledge that my dog is a Labrador retriever named Shonka.