Kris Popendorf

I'm Kris Popendorf, senior at Logan High School, in Logan, Utah, and programmer on the 27890 ThinkQuest ‘99 team. My position has been difficult on our ThinkQuest team. One of the largest problems in the beginning was my distance from the other two team members, who were both in the same state, even in the same city, while I was in a whole different time zone, leading to my state of being proximity challenged. Of course, thanks to the fact this is an internet project, once things got rolling, our communiques became much more efficient and the only distances remaining could be measured in the milliseconds of our ping times.

My duties on the team covered the technical and programming aspects of our web site. I've been writing perl and javascript mostly, and getting things to work with existing structures and putting together new elements. Javascript plays a more and more integral role in modern web sites, and its very frustrating trying to make things compatible with all the different browsers out there. On my personal soap box, I'd like to point out that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the worst case. Testing is virtually impossible, as even if one can scrounge up a less than current version, one cannot install it, because of how the newer versions have wedged themselves into some of our most rudimentary levels of Microsoft Windows, making an uninstall "impossible." Not to mention their documentation, which is like trying to find a flea on an elephant's ascot.

Anyways, enough about you, more about me: Outside of ThinkQuest, I'm an active thespian at the highschool. My first exposure to being in theater was as a freshman. Last year I won the L.H.S. Thespian Award for best character actor in a play, for playing Mr. Kimber in Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's George Washington Slept Here. Second to that, the most enjoyable performance I did was on L.H.S.'s Night of One Acts, doing a couple of Rowan Atkinson and Monty Python sketches. Next year I look forward to trying out musical theater.

As far as programming goes, I've been programming since a very young age, about six, but that was of course BASIC and Logo. I've grown rapidly since then in my programming skill and scope. I worked for 4 some years as a programmer on an LP Mud called The Two Towers. MudOS (which T2T runs on) is an interesting system to write for, as its language is much like C++, yet enhanced for interactivity. The environment is a very cool sort of nebulous swarm code constantly changing, anything but static. Probably the most advanced thing I wrote for it was a text-based checkers program with an drunken AI, which for a Mud is pretty darn cool. I say drunken AI because instead of having a cold intangible opponent (which is wholly not in the spirit of mudding) I created a persona which acts just like a player, and has a penchant for beer and sandwiches.

As for the other image on this page, you can see my dog, Katie. She's one of my main coding companions and spends numerous evenings and nights near my computer (when all good code is born). The other shows my work area, and the various computers I use. There's my personal baby, my old Gateway 2000 Pentium 200 MMX which has very few original parts remaining. This computer runs Win95 and RedHat 5.1, and is in charge of all of my personal tasks, programming, and gaming. The one that appears to have an LCD screen and a monitor is my Gateway 2000 P5-233 laptop. It once was the main architectural computer, but has since been transcended by my latest creation. In its retirement it now functions largely as a dedicated half-life server, and backup gaming post. The latest and greatest to join the network is my personal creation, a 3D/architectural workstation (for my mom's architectural firm, The Design Collaborative) featuring dual P3-550s and a gig of ram. As far as gaming goes....well...Whoah.