About

Photosphere:
After the 2004 US presidential election that would keep Bush around for another four years, I was angry; angry enough to make my own political website.  This isn’t that site, though I did register Photosphere.us at the same time.  Photosphere is the second website I've created.  The first faded away when I left Stanford in 1998.

The site's pages are created on a Windows PC.  At first, I used Microsoft Word or Photoshop 6.0's photo gallery maker, but as the site grew and as I became more and more disgusted by Microsoft's software, I switched to generating almost all of the structure with a custom Python script of my own creation.  Generating the entire site, including thumbnail creation and processing EXIF data, takes about four minutes.  Aside from unifying the look and feel of all the pages, which had diverged over four years, the Python processing has also made it very easy to eliminate worthless data in the image files, reducing the total site size from about 240 MB to only 144 MB (in March 2008).

Why the 'Photosphere' name?  It's a site for photos =/, and I like to think that in some small way, it radiates all that's good and right... or ought to be.

Once I get a bit better at Python, I'll update these very old Site Statistics


Me:
I'm Greg James.  I grew up in the north of Orange County, California, and went off to college at Harvey Mudd in Claremont, where you could sit out in the sun all day and never get a sunburn, owing to all the ozone in the smog.  I'm very happy to be in northern California now, where I first worked for the Stanford FEL Center (demolished early in 2008), and then for NVIDIA.

I like:  getting phone calls, sharing favorite things, building stuff, playing music, and chocolate, among other things.
I'm frustrated by: selfishness and people who don't seem to realize that we're all in this together.


My Family:
I’m very thankful for my big family and loving parents.  I was raised by two aerospace engineers and an artist/teacher (who also happens to be a great cook and makes the best chocolate cake in the world!).  One grandfather was first-generation Italian-American, born in the Bronx in 1911, and two of my grandmas ran liquor together during prohibition, or so the story goes.  My brother is doing cancer research at the University of Washington in Seattle.