About

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Robert Heinlein

My name is Jessie and I live with my wife and three boys in the Pacific Northwest. I work and volunteer for local non-profits. In my spare time I enjoy working on home improvement projects, wrenching on my collection of old vehicles, strumming the guitar, and tinkering with computers.

defy perception is where my interest in web design and my personal interests intersect. My interest in web design goes back to 1996 when I first got an internet connection. Since then, I've been interested in web design and development and over the years I have worked on a lot of small personal projects and some medium sized projects. defy perception is an amalgamation of those projects.

The inspiration behind defy perception can be found by visiting: kottke.org, Chris Glass, among many others.

Timeline of defy perception

2001-2005: defyperception.net was originally launched on October 23, 2001 as an unofficial Incubus fan site. I had been a fan of Incubus since the release of their 3rd studio album, Make Yourself, and at the time was disappointed in the lack of band news, tour dates, etc. defy perception was inspired by other unofficial fan-created band sites, mainly Green Plastic, a Radiohead fan-site and Weezer.com, technically the band's official website but which operated more like a fan-site. The launch of defy perception coincided with the release of Incubus' 4th studio album, Morning View, also released on October 23, 2001. During its heyday, defy perception featured up-to-date band news, tour dates, album information, song lyrics, photos, guitar tabs, etc. and hosted a small, but active Incubus fan community and message board. Some of it is archived on the Wayback Machine.

2005-2006: After a few years, aggregrating and reporting Incubus-related news daily/weekly and updating and maintaining a website began to wear on me. A lot was happening in my personal life--wrapping up and graduating from college, an internship, a full-time job, a girlfriend that I really liked, working on car projects, etc. The website was becoming a chore and no longer fun to maintain.

In March 2006, defy perception became my personal website where I started hosting my own HTML and CSS projects and websites for clients. Around this time, I designed and hosted a handful of websites for locally-owned businesses, wedding websites for friends (including my own), and other band fan-sites.

2010-2015: By late 2009, jQuery and API's were gaining in popularity and I figured out enough to re-design and re-launch defy perception with a bunch of dynamic features.

2016-2018: This is the 3rd or 4th (I've lost track) incarnation of my personal website. This version was built with responsiveness in-mind and was built upon the Skeleton framework.

2018: As of July 1, 2018, the website got a mild refresh. I have moved away from Skeleton and rolled my own (simple) CSS grid layout.

defyperception is hand-crafted using Atom and is hosted at Hole in the Wall where you can get awesome web hosting for a great price (Hi Karina!). Social media icons are from Iconmonstr.