About Alrak
Had someone told me 19 years ago that I'd be making my living with computers I'd have pointed and laughed. I was scared of computers1 until one afternoon in 1988 when I was a graduate student in European History and had a 20 page paper due the next day on "The Office of the Chancellor Under Henry II of England 1154-1189" for my Origins of the European State class. I somehow knew the typewriter wasn't going to cut it, so a fellow student showed me how to insert an IBM PC DOS 2.0 disk into the big floppy drive2 and flip the switch and then how to pull that disk out and put the WordStar 3.0 disk in. After one evening with this wondrous creation, I was hooked instantly. (BTW, the paper was apparently boring enough to qualify for an A - I still have it if anyone is having trouble sleeping...)
Despite this, and other, exciting academic achievements3, alas, I could not obtain work4 in the History field, so I took my hobby in computers and turned it into a profession. Initially, I was a mainframe programmer and also did DOS and Macintosh stuff, gradually being lured to the Dark Side of Windows . My first exposure to Visual Basic was doing Access Basic, and then when VB4 came out, I learned it and have been doing VB programming since then. (The History knowledge rears its head now and again, usually at parties - folks dread playing Celebrity Password [note: do NOT Google that phrase - click here for rules] with me...hey, Caspar David Friedrich is a well-known German artist...really...)
In 1996, after achieving my Microsoft Certified Trainer and Solution Developer (which I now have for both Visual Studio 6 and .NET) designations I entered the rewarding, yet sometimes scary world of self-employment. I do both training and consulting, mostly middle-tier COM/COM+ components, ADO/ADO.NET and ASP/ASP.NET. In addition to the VB/VB.NET training, I also teach courses on C#, Office VBA, Visual Interdev/Active Server Pages, XML, FrontPage, Site Server/Site Server Commerce, and Windows Architecture/Solution Design. (If you would like to see a copy of my Microsoft Certified Professional transcript, which includes exams I've passed, I keep an HTML version here.)
I revived Alrak's Parallel Universe5 in 2002 as a back-up location to post zip files for students when the Element K message boards were acting flakey. At some point I decided, hey, why not make this a compendium of Instructor Ramblings and Challenge Labs. And, here we are!
I have to add, as a curious aside, I've switched to maintaining this site using Dreamweaver MX instead of FrontPage...perhaps resistance isn't futile, after all...;-)
1This is in contrast to some other instructors/geeks I know who apparently began programming on an abacus, from birth, moving on to the ubiquitous Commodore 64 in preschool, etc. etc.
2Prehistory lesson: Once upon a time, before PCs had hard drives, the only floppy disks were 360 KB 5.25" floppy disks.
3"Spurious Spectres of Conspiracy: German Spies and the Bridgeport Munitions Strikes of 1915", a paper delivered at the Phi Alpha Theta Midwest regional meeting in 1990 (as President of the Zeta Nu chapter at UN-L I organized the meeting - of course I had to give a paper! ;-). And, more timely than I would certainly want, my MA thesis, "From Constantinople to Kabul: Tsarist Russia, British India, and the Origins of the Second Afghan War of 1878", dealt with Afghanistan and the "Great Game" played between Britain and Russia through the 19th century. (Call #LD3656 1990 .M346 at UN-L Love Library, Theses section - under a former name...)
4There was an economic recession in 1990-91. A liberal arts degree (or two) basically conferred upon one the ability to say "would you like fries with that?"...(kinda like now...;-)
5A free Geocities site I started in the spring of 1997 and never did much with other than have the cool twinkling stars and Star Trek midi files. In 2004 it was given its own domain name and moved to a 1&1.com server. Alrak (all-rack) is my name spelled backwards. It sounds kind of Area51-ish. Parallel Universe is a favorite theme of mine, basically meaning that given the infinite combinations of human free will with Divine intention, there are many different ways our lives could have panned out. (And, no, I don't have a beard in this one! ;-)
Alrak's Course Resources ©2002-2007 Karla Carter. All rights reserved. This material (including, but not limited to, Mini-lectures and Challenge Labs) may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact Karla.