About
Vital statistics:
Name: Aaron Barker
Location: Springville, Utah (40 miles south of Salt Lake City)
Height: 6′
Weight: 210 (and rising)
Family: Married Kaylene in 1997, and we just had our first son Dallin on July 13, 2005 with another one on the way in July 2008
About the site:
First came online May 2004. Mainly driven as a place to publish a writeup on Sprint IFR, I had also wanted a place to talk about, link to, or point fingers at various parts of my life. I have since updated my family site to keep this site more geek/internet oriented and put my personal/family stuff over there.
What is a “zelph”??
It’s just a name I ran into and thought it was cool. I started using it as my name for online gaming, and got the domain when a friend and I were wondering one night if our respective names were available. I never did anything with the domain so figured why not use it for this.
Me and My Hobbies
I’m originally from Provo, Utah and love being in and among the mountains. Growing up, I did the “band geek” thing from Junior High through High school, playing the tuba for symphonic and marching bands, and electric bass for Jazz Band. I also played football (defensive line) through High School, and enjoy playing basketball to this day, but don’t play nearly enough (thus the above weight rising thing). I used to really be into sports but all the cockiness of the athletes made it suck for me, and gave me no desire to support them. I haven’t watched a full NBA game since the strike in 1993 (or so). I’ve always hated baseball, and enjoy watching football when the wife will let me.
I love to play computer games, specifically on the PC. I specifically like First Person Shooters, and currently play Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Team Fortress 2.
At one point in my life I was going into Sports Medicine to become an Athletic trainer. I got into it in High School and continued into college. I really enjoyed doing it, but knew that it paid squat… which was fine for a single guy living at home. But when I got engaged, I decided I might actually need money, so switched over to my hobby of computers and the internet.
I have also enjoyed being a hobby photographer over the years, and have been getting into it a little more seriously lately.
My Internet/Work History
I started playing on the web back in January of ‘96. Back then your “homepage” was a list of what you liked to do and a picture of your cat (or similar). I liked Disney and so wanted to put some Disney picture on my page but every Disney fansite I went to said they didn’t put pictures up for fear of Disney shutting them down. So I started collecting what few images I could find and went ahead and made a site with them. I figured if Disney wanted to tell me to stop doing it, then all they had to do was ask (or sue me for the $10 I had to my name). Long story made short… that hobby site grew and grew until the abilities I learned by maintaining it became my career. I have written the backend for all scripts on the site except for the message boards.
I am currently an Interaction Designer for the LDS Church where I work with the most talented group of people I have ever worked with. My current project is to create a library of reusable components (Pattern Libary) for other designers to use that will save time and money in development, as well as make a more consistent interface for users across applications.
Previous to the church I worked as a Software Engineer at Prosper Media where I work on internal applications and direct marketing pages. It’s a smaller company that is making moves towards web standards, and I enoyed the challenge of setting the standards and practices to use in that move.
Before that I lived in the Kansas City area, where I was a Sr Code Architecht at Sprint. I was part of the User Experience team that lead the UI, IA and code standards for the company. For that specific part of the job I used CSS, XHTML, JS and the DOM. Inside the company I also used PHP/MySQL to administer many aspsects of our day to day processes. I built a project and time tracking script to.. well… track projects, and track time. I had also built several other scripts to help publish code to multiple places off of the same codebase.
I have absolutely no “artsy” parts in me. I can’t design to save my live (look at my sites), but can code up pretty much anything someone puts in front of me. I love to learn new tips and tricks, and strive to become better each day.