About the Webmaster and Webmistress
When I started this site in 1996, my
goal was to produce a site about something that people were interested in
and few sites truly touched upon. The outcome was a site called --Hot
Songs-- which contained midi files for several different musical artists.
After awhile this got rather boring, with only 500 hits on the counter to
boot. I then decided to add content about artists that I enjoyed.
--Hot Songs-- Jewel Kilcher was introduced in February 1997. A few weeks
before I had bought my first copy of Pieces of You on cassette. In just
a few weeks, I had all but worn the tape out. I decided that Jewel was
the ideal candidate after some research on the web. I had only found
three good sites: Adam Longfellow's Pieces of Jewel, Colin Stuckless's
website, and another site that I later negotiated with to post the Coffee
Haus pictures. As time passed, I worked on --Hot Songs-- Jewel Kilcher
in my spare time.
A few months before I heard Foolish Games would be released on the Batman Soundtrack, I renamed the site Foolish Games to inspire interest in the site and because it was my favorite song at the time. It was also still an original name for a Jewel site. Foolish Games flourished as I continued my daily work on it. I found myself spending hours on the site improving the littlest detail. I realized that I was in a state of depression. My parents divorce struck me hard, as my whole world changed. Looking back I see that this site started in part as a way to deal with my feelings. Pieces of You was a real inspiration in my life.
Later, a new face entered the picture. I met Caryn at a friend's party. It was one of those situations where you make a complete idiot of yourself and you find her staring back at you with the most amazing smile you have ever seen. Caryn and I were married in September of 2000. Of course, that explains the picture above. :)
The fan poetry area has been deployed by Caryn. She has helped me greatly with updates, testing, and constructive criticism. Without her help, this site would still be chaos. I now end this page with a little more about myself and a paragraph from Caryn about herself.
Luke:
From time to time I get time to relax in the comfort of my home reading, or listening to music like Jewel, U2, or R.E.M. Hobbies of mine include reading books on Unix, programming in java or vb.net and looking at w3.org for the latest web standards. I started work on my own webserver called Midnight. I just started another website called Just Journal. It is an online journal service. My remaining time is spent with Caryn.
As you may have guessed, I am a computer geek. I have an associates degree from KVCC in computer science (05/2003) and currently attend Western Michigan University as a Computer Science and Theory student. Prior to college, I worked for Avalon Systems for two and a half years as a System Administrator, Webmaster, and technical support representative. Avalon is a consulting firm that also owns an ISP and hosting company. I administered a Windows NT 4 network, and a Netscape Enterprise server running on a Sun server with Solaris 2.51. I did security audits and onsite work for several companies, banks, and the UAW. In addition to school, I also do some freelance web development in ASP.NET/VB.NET for e-commerce sites.
I own an iMac DV 400 and a Compaq. The Macintosh is my baby... it has Mac OS X (10.2) Jaguar. I do all the work for this website on the Mac. I started the site on a Packard Bell Pentium 100 with Windows 95. My Compaq is used for gaming and vb.net development only. It currently runs Windows XP home and Redhat Linux 9.
This website runs on a FreeBSD server that I administer.
Caryn:
While I am not the most devout Jewel fan (some of her songs make me ill),
I’ve been more or less involved with foolishgames.com for five and
a half
years. My personal music tastes include U2, REM, Melissa Etheridge and
various other artists. I still enjoy dusting off a Nirvana record.
I have a bachelor’s degree from Kalamazoo College. I studied computer
science and religion. Next fall, I will be starting my master’s degree
in
computer science at Western Michigan University. I worked at L. Lee
Stryker Center for two years as a network administrator. Currently I work
as a contractor to a large pharmaceutical company. Soon this will change.
My primary computers are my iBook and Power Mac G4. I’m Windows free – at
least at home!
