Finding Eve
It must have been during interterm in 1995 when I found her. Interterm was a period between semesters that my alma mater offered short, summer style classes. I was being tutored on the craft of web pages by a friend, Mark Johnson1, and spent a lot of time in the computer lab ‘viewing source’ and browsing the web. It was a good break from my data entry job where I was told by one Greg Vaughn that a website for the admissions department would be a ‘waste of time’.
I had many techniques for finding good pages but the one I employed on this occasion was to pick a school I admired and search for student and faculty homepages. Invariably Cal Tech would pique my interest and along the way I found Eve.
Eve, also known as ‘The Pi Girl’, was more than geek: she was cool. She was cognoscenti. When ingesting a lot of Cypherpunk, Wired and Video Games, a girl who could ‘code’ better, knew more Calculus and could bludgeon you with wit was worth many a daydream2. Especially when correspondence cards like the following presented themselves for my entering in SAM, the school’s enrollment database:
Name: Britney Wallerson
Why are you interested in Biola:
I feel God calling me to His ministry and I know I can do this with a famly so I wanted to go at Biola and your admissions counsel came to my school to talk about it! And I want to stay close to home I’m from Victorville!
Ironically enough, I still take breaks from work to browse the web and a few weeks ago printed an article Joel Spolsky wrote entitled Fixing Venture Capital. There is, apparently, in the collective conscience of the internet, some processing related to the dot bomb phenomenon. My own self accusatory thoughts of failures from the period are softened by reading about others' experiences of the time. Joel is, as usual, very thoughtful and succinct in pointing out the problems with some Venture Capitalists. I’d like to think they aren’t all as short sighted as his models indicate but my faith in human nature when it comes to sums like $38 million is… fragile.
Joel referenced ArsDigita in his story and my connection there immediately lit a bulb: I carry a case full of CDs containing some of the lectures that were offered at ArsDigita University. I was aware of ArsDigita because of Philip Greenspun, one of the founders whose site I’ve linked to since I made began blogging.
I found out that a few veterans of ArsDigita3, including Greenspun, have written out their experiences with the startup and the rise and fall of what seemed a cliché story of a tech company: founded by smart technical folks who care about being honest and making good things, growing too fast and ending in a heap of dot com rubble.
As I read about it, I discovered a long story by Eve of her experiences there. It seems that after Cal Tech (and Berkeley) she went east to Boston and was one of the people who got ArsDigita off the ground. It was like a weird reunion with a person I had met, just not with the conventional medium. Her old site is still around and I get the same giddy fascination I used to have for the web along with a bit of nostalgia. She’s grown up though and has a different site that has the self branding and professionalism of a web developing grown up. She is teaching at a school in Utah. Hopefully she still gets to be obsessed with pi and hopefully she still develops for the web. Oh, and she’s still better looking than St Jude.
1He ran a very popular Houston Rockets site at the time.
2Until I saw G use her Mac.
3Philip Greenspun's article. Eve writes her version. Michael Yoon can't bear but to respond.
7:58:42 AM 
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