About
This site began as all good stories do, with a journey. Way back in the summer of 1998, having failed out of about half of my classes the previous semester i did what any logical youth of that age would do: i embarked on a road trip. Times were good – gas was a $1.05/gallon, Superchunk and Wilco were blasting through a jury-rigged discman and I had the bitchinest ford escort wagon on the road.
Outside of Taos we came across a livestock sign that had been tagged with a little flying saucer. Taos is weird and cool like that. We drove on.
Fast-forward a few years and I find myself at the terminus of another trip: a post-college foray into the Dallas Architecture scene, followed by a tactical withdrawal back to College Station then concluding with a strategic re-route to Austin, where I now dwell. (The lesson learned here: when they say ‘go west, young man’ you should listen. And that Dallas is a crap-hole).Anyhow, aspiring designers who are stuck in a dead-end retail job need a portfolio, and so they need a web site to plug said portfolio. My last name is kind of a mouthful (it’s Swiss apparently, like my bike), So I dredged up something clever, and it stuck. All based on random graffiti about a million miles back down the road.
Since then we’ve evolved. The site stopped being a portfolio when I discovered blogs weren’t really that hard to run and that I’m actually a decent writer. I got over my fear of no one being able to spell my last name and setup wadetreichler.com, a nice repository of my work. I’ve redone the site something like 7 times over the years but who’s really counting. It’s become a creative outlet - when I’m stumped or frustrated, i come here and tinker until I can get the creative juices moving again.
And I still drive a bitchin wagon.
Other People’s Work
This site takes advantage of a lot of other people’s hard work and ideas–Plugins and snippets of code made available for free on this crazy business that is the internet. Let’s give credit where credit is deserved. This site has WordPress under the hood, and makes use of many bits of the Classic kubrick theme as well as numerous tips and tricks from the Codex. I’ve used the lightbox.js script by Lokesh Dhakar, the CSS Browser Selector Script by Rafael Lima (an amazing piece of work that helps get IE to behave), Del.icio.us for WordPress by Ricardo González, the best Flickr plugin ever written, PictoBrowser, and the work of a bazzillion other helpful souls all across the internets who are willing to help. Thank you.
