About Me

Hi there, glad you are here. The name's Michael Turnwall, glad to meet you (in a virtual kind of way). I currently reside in sunny San Diego with my beautiful girlfriend Nicole, and I currently work for a design firm as a Senior Web Developer. I've been doing web development now for about 5 years now and for about 3 of those years it's been my job. I love my job. I think it's a blast to create web pages and I get paid for it. I'm constantly challenged in my job and forced to come up with new creative ways to solve problems. The best part about working for a design firm is that I'm always working on new sites. I used to work at Gateway and it sure got boring fast having to work on the same site everyday.

I spend a lot of time on the internet. I think it's one of the greatest inventions ever made. It allows anyone from anywhere to have access to information 24/7. The hard part is telling what is the good information from the junk. That is the only draw back to the internet. Well, that and addicting flash games and funny videos.

When I'm not on the computer you can find me playing video games, picking up new DVDs from Best Buy, getting a new book from the bookstore, or just relaxing with Nicole. I've started to get active again finally. I've started to go back to the gym before work and Thursday night is softball night.

Turnwall.net is actually my 2nd site. My first one was houseofmirage.com. I started that site back in 2002. I used that site to practice my coding and design skills as well as my writing abilitites. Let's just say I've come a long since those early days. I stopped posting to houseofmirage.com and eventually got bored with it and the site just sat there. When I started thinking about a new site I realized that I had changed since the time I got houseofmirage.com. So I decided if I was going to start a new site I was going to start everything from scratch, even the domain name. I wanted a domain name that described me and nothing describes me better than my own name. Some months later and countless revisions I ended up with what you see here.

Now here are some quick technical details about Turnwall.net for the geeks out there. Turnwall.net is hosted by Dreamhost who is a great host provider by the way. Be sure to check them out. All code is hand written using Textmate on my Apple G4 15" PowerBook. I also have a PC for testing in IE. The content is managed by Expression Engine and then uploaded to the server usinig Transmit. Each page should validate as XHMTL 1.0 Transitional. My CSS won't validate because I use some hacks to handle png transparencies in IE.

You might be wondering why if I'm a guy do I have a woman in my banner making it look like I'm a woman. Well, that woman in the banner isn't me. It's my beautiful girlfriend Nicole. This site is a reflection of my life and my thoughts so of course I had to include her somewhere. What better place than in the spot that everyone that comes here will see.

The original picture was taken by her friend David who is a photographer. One day Nicole and David were hanging out and he started taking pictures of her. He's a great photographer. You can check out his web site to see more of his work.