About Sheila and Her Page

This is my personal home page, where I collect information that was useful, amusing or interesting to me, and that I hope others may find likewise. In any case, as long as I collect this stuff in one place, I can hopefully look it up again when I need to refer to it.

My interests are Computers, Math, Education and Family, and so these are the types of topics that are collected here.

I like learning, trying new things and have tried in life to spend my time doing things that I enjoyed. I also like helping people out, and try to provide assistance to others where I can.

A graduate of Mater Dei High School, I entered U.C.I. as an undeclared major, Bio-sci affiliated, intending to go pre-med. But I decided after a year that pre-med wasn\’t for me and changed my major to German and during my senior year in the program was able to participate in the UC Education Abroad Program in Göttingen, Germany where I studied at the Universität Göttingen. The expenses were paid by Rotary International through their Academic-Year Ambassadorial Scholarship Program.

One of my college jobs was working at the Plaza Inn Restaurant on Main Street, Disneyland. This is where I met my husband, who was also working there at the time. After graduating from U.C.I, I got a job teaching high school math and German, which quickly became a full-time math schedule. I completed my California Teaching Credential while working full time and having babies, so it took a few years to complete the requirements.

The more I taught math, the more I wished I had a more formal and extensive background in that subject area, which prompted me to apply to the Master’s program at Cal Poly Pomona. I had a very positive experience there, and also was able to teach as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for a number of years prior to finishing my M.S. Again, the full-time high school teaching job and another baby in the middle of the master’s slowed me down, and it took several years for me to complete the program.

As my Master’s program neared completion, it turned out that the demands of my high school teaching job, my family’s changing needs and my own changing interests prompted me to resign from my teaching position. I took several months off, so that I could complete my Master’s Thesis.

At about this time, I was hired as a Service Rep at FutureQuest, Inc., a web hosting company in Florida. I had hosted this site with FutureQuest since August of 1999 and was extremely pleased to join their staff. I also became a Lecturer in Mathematics at Cal Poly Pomona, where I continue to teach part-time. Since I work from my home for FutureQuest, and the Cal Poly position is only part-time and near to home, this allows me to spend much more time with my family than I was able to do when teaching high school.

Education:

Degrees:

• Graduate of Mater Dei H.S.
• B.A. in German with emphasis on Linguistics, U.C.I.
• M.S. in Applied Mathematics, Cal Poly Pomona

Other:

I’ve taken a number of courses in Computer Science and Programming and have self-taught myself HTML, Python programming, and a number of scripting techniques such as qmail email scripting, CGI scripting and the like.

Jobs:

• Disneyland, 1979-1981 (Plaza Inn Restaurant on Main Street)
• various coffee shops and restaurants as a waitress, 1980-1984
• Mater Dei H.S., 1983-2001 (mathematics teacher and other subjects…)
• FutureQuest, Inc. 2002-present (Service Rep)
• Cal Poly Pomona, 2002-present (Lecturer in Mathematics)

Hobbies, Interests, Affiliations and Experiences

Usenet (newsgroups) – I have a longtime interest in reading and participating in newsgroups. These days I don’t seem to spend quite as much time on that. However, I do still moderate k12.ed.math (since August 1997), maintain the k12.* hierarchy web page and maintain the moderator robot for comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. I also drop in from time to time on other groups, such as comp.lang.python and the spamcop private hierarchy of newsgroups.

Spam fighting – I am a fairly avid anti-spammer. I’ve been a subscribing member to the SpamCop.net services for a number of years. Although at this point I do not report most of my spam, preferring to filter it now due to the volume received, I have actively engaged in spam reporting at times and do regularly use some of the common blacklists for spam filtering. I’ve written a number of spam filtering scripts, and other email scripts, that are available via the FutureQuest Community forums. Some of them are specific to the FutureQuest mail system. Part of my job with FutureQuest also involves spam complaint investigations.

FutureQuest.net – FutureQuest has been my web host for this site since August 1999. I’ve made many friends in their Community Forums and in March 2002 I joined their staff.

Dmoz.org – I’ve been an editor for the Open Directory Project for quite some time. I did a LOT of editing for them during the summer of 2001. Since that time I’ve spent less time on it, and resigned most of my large categories. However, I do still edit some a few small categories and check in every now and then to review and add sites to the directory.

Python Programming – I’ve learned and played with a number of programming languages, starting with UCSD Pascal back in 1980. Did a project for the U.S. Department of Energy, via a teacher research program, in Visual Basic 3.0. Short course in Fortran 77, and taught C++ for the AP Computer Science course for a few years. I had seen mention of Python before, but seriously started learning it in 2001 and took to it like a duck to water. Love Python. Try to use it for any programming that I do now. Have dabbled with Perl and PHP, but Python is so much easier for me to work with. Just love it. If you haven’t seriously tried Python and you program or would like to learn now to program, you might want to look at it.