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Copyright
All of the text, code, photographs, graphics, and data on this site are copyright Anthony Darrouzet-Nardi 1998-2007, except those I have used with permission.
For personal, non-commercial use, you may print any of my photographs, graphics, or text. For non-commercial web use, you can use photos or graphics (but not text) for free as long as you include credit with my name and a link to my homepage. For example,
photographs courtesy <a href="http://anthony.darrouzet-nardi.net/">Anthony Darrouzet-Nardi</a>
Contact me if you wish to use material from this site for non-personal use in print, or commercial purposes of any kind.
About me
After being conceived on a tropical island in the South Pacific, I was born at Stanford Hospital on March 17, 1981. I was raised in the Silicon Valley town of Mountain View, California.
While growing up in Mountain View, my peers, teachers, and family helped me develop my interests in music, research, and the enviornment. During my junior year at Mountain View High School, I worked on a molecular biology project at Stanford University as an assignment for my Biology AP class. That same year, at the suggestion of my parents, I volunteered at a national monument, and, with a couple friends from school, co-founded an environmental club. When I arrived as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, I combined my interests in research and environmental issues to begin doing field research in ecology. Currently, I am a graduate student in ecology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My main professional interests are the study of complex ecological systems, the role of nature in human society, and the visual display of scientific information. I've been playing the trumpet since fourth grade and recently I have enjoyed playing modern jazz and funk. This essay by Eric Raymond summarizes my work philosophy.
One of the main purposes of this website is to tip my hat to the people who share and create my best experiences. For example, the Acknowledgements page is a comprehensive hat-tipping extravaganza to everyone who has ever had a substantial interpersonal influence on me.
In the future, I plan to get married and reproduce myself. Right now, I hang out with my wonderful family and friends. I have three overarching shout-outs to share: (1) My immediate family is particularly awesome. Though we are now scattered, we travel regularly to see each other. We have recently been enjoying a family book club. (2) I also have a soft spot for my friends from Mountain View High School. Our clique has proven remarkably resistant to geographic separation. And (3) I have been living in several cooperative houses during and after college and I have developed wonderful connections with my housemates. As the button on my backpack says, "I love my co-op!"
Site History
I first posted this website on 8 February 1998 as an assignment for my English class junior year in high school. Our assignment was to weave a “tapestry” of stories, ideas, art, and principles that defined our lives during our transition to adulthood. The tapestry's purpose is still visible in pages like the Proust Questions and the Acknowledgements. Another of the ten original tapestry items was this essay about Hovenweep.
Making this site
This site functions like a slow moving blog that I update several times a year. These days, blogs and social networking sites are very popular. For me, one of the fun parts of having a web presence is doing all of the design myself. The result is this website, with its slow trickle of content that is organized and presented just how I like.
This site is hosted on The Artifex, a non-profit 501(c)3 organization run by my good friend Hunter Blanks and several of his friends. The Artifex was started by Hunter and his friends because they wanted permanent email addresses. It has grown to be a full service web-serving community that hosts many websites, including darrouzet-nardi.net. The Artifex is a great example of user empowerment: it runs nearly all open-source software software (GNU/Linux environment), its users are mostly self-taught, and it incurs few expenses. The Artifex is basically a web-serving co-op.
I use an Olympus E-20n digital camera and various Macintoshes running OS X. The core of this site's typesetting and layout is this CSS style sheet. In designing this site, resources that have been particularly valuable include htmldog.com, and The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
The update procedure for a slide show goes like this:
1. I process batches of photos in Photoshop and ImageReady, optimizing contrast, sharpening, and cropping as necessary, then renaming, and saving for the web. I arrange composite images and draw graphics in Illustrator. Then, I scp the images to the Artifex.
2. I run this shell script, which duplicates these files (First, Middles, Last) creating an html page for each photo, with the appropriate page title and links.
3. I write new text in BBEdit, using its preview feature for WYSIWYG action. This includes the photo narratives, index.html, siteindex.html, the new file for /updates/, and any other pages I might be updating like the Acknowledgements or the Proust questions. Finally, I scp everything to the Artifex.
Each update takes half a day to several days of work, but the automation allows most of the time to be spent actually editing images and writing content.