Jeffrey Frazier

Jeffrey Frazier

My name is Jeffrey Frazier, and I am a 17 year old senior at Norman High School North in Norman, Oklahoma. I am what one might refer to as a bona fide computer nerd, spending more time on the computer than some people spend doing more trivial things, like sleeping or watching that strange non-interactive image streamer that lives in the living room.

For about as far back as I can recall, I have been a lover of mathematics, with a particular affinity for more discrete and abstract mathematical principles. My sophomore year of high school, I was allowed to participate in a special program in my school for lovers of mathematics. Titled AEGIS (Academic Excellence through Guidance, Industry, and Scholarship), the program introduced me to (and assimilated me into) a way of thinking I like to call the "Doc" side, named after the program's creator and teacher/mentor, Doctor David "Doc" Drennan.

I am the webmaster for a web design company called Intellement World Wide Web Services, and also a member of the HTML Writers' Guild. I have been working with the web and web programming for nearly three years, and I have shown myself to be a very fast learner. I am completely self-taught, and code all HTML by hand as a matter of principle.

As far as this ThinkQuest site goes, my main responsibility was that of writer. I wrote all of the mathematical demonstrations used on the page, with the exception of Apartment Buildings, written by Matt while I was away. I did a bit of Javascript work, such as the calculation programs seen on the In Action pages for Binet's Formula and the Successor Formula. I created nearly all the images used in the learning demonstrations, did the content coding for most of the lessons, and created several Flash animations for use on the site. I also spent many, many hours sitting in front of a computer with Matt Anderson, scrutinizing the site design and working pesky little details out that are inherent in such a coding endeavor, things like where to put the search box on the page, what color to make this image, how much information to put on one page, etc.

The new machine, in all it's technological splendor.

For many years I struggled to get by on my old dinosaur of a computer, a 486 DX2/66 MHz monolith of antiquity. However, on June 16, 1999, I received a brand new computer from Nutrend Computers that was all I could ask for. Pentium III 450, 128 MB of RAM, 17GB hard drive, 19" monitor, 6X DVD-ROM, monstrous video card, etc. It's beautiful. I love it. It's my baby.

The future Very Small Array

I still keep the old computer around, though, just for old time's sake. I have plans to make it a dual-boot Linux box and play with that for a while. When I get around to it, the two computers will be networked together, creating what shall be known as the Very Small Array. Until then, they are still just two computers sitting on a desk in my study.

In April of 1998, I went to Oklahoma City and saw a cable modem demonstration. I was utterly blown away by what I saw, and came back to Norman full of questions for our cable provider about the service. I was told that the service was not available in Norman, and wouldn't be for some time. Fifteen months later, in July of 1999, I got an e-mail from my cable provider saying that the service had been made available. A few days later, I was surfing the web with a sewer pipe instead of a drinking straw (in terms of bandwidth, not cleanliness).