Welcome to The Completely Claire Website! Lots of new things have happened and are happening in my life, in fact, so many new things that the newness of it all demands a total renovation of my personal website. I'm coming up with tons of new material so I decided that it was time to move on and update everything in my old site. No, actually, that site I can't help but look at with some fondness (because it served as my first venue for practicing hand-coded HTML and other basic web stuff), so in the end I decided to leave it untouched and build a separate, completely new website instead. So here you are. =)

The first thing you'll notice is the new logo, ClaireWorks. You'll notice it whether you like it or not because it's right up front on this page. =) One has to put the ubiquitous "Copyright such and such year by such and such person. All rights reserved" thingy at the bottom of each web page created, and I was looking for some name to put in the such and such person part. ClaireWorks comes from one of my first names plus "Works", the combo actually inspired by the Mac wordprocessing app ClarisWorks. Yes, there was a time in my life when I was actually a Mackie! Not surprising, except for those of you who know that I'm an member of the Nagoya International Personal Computer Club, a city-wide group composed of a hodge-podge of nerdish Wintel PC-only users, with just a few Mackie and Linux renegades (As to being nerdish, wish I could call myself an honest-to-goodness nerd. Can't, though. Grey Matter Deficiency, you see). =)

The second thing is the inevitable fact that I am uh, maturing (read: aging). I thought that my personal website should reflect this uh, inevitable senescence (read: aging). Becoming just a little bit wiser also means becoming more net-wise, which means becoming more considerate of lower-level browsers and slow net connections and busy people in general. Now that I'm experiencing what it's like to be killed in the workplace, I myself can't afford to sit and wait for web pages to download. I want it fast and I want it now. While I find it really difficult to get out of the graphics-overkill tendency, I'm trying. =) Also, I'm now paying attention to better, more careful coding and scripting...I think. I dunno how it'll turn out at your end, though.

Third, as I mentioned earlier there's tons of new material here, thanks to a new philosophical transition (from Why think, when you can rage? [theme of The Nagoya Queen, my very first website] to Go ahead and rage, but don't let it kill you [theme of Chiyoryunami, the name inspired by Yokozuna Chiyonofuji, the greatest sumo guy to grace the face of the universe] to Why rage and kill yourself when you can rave and have a life?, theme of this Completely Claire Website, containing mostly notes and jottings about stuff going on here, miscellany which don't fit into any of my other websites (laugh). It's a smorgasboard of sorts, half musings and half online diary. Not that you were asking for a diary from me, but I like to read the online diaries of my friends and I think I have friends who'd like to read mine as well. =) Also, hopefully this website will reflect a more positive attitude toward life in general and the state of humanity in particular. *GRIN*

Fourth, and perhaps most important in terms of artistic expression (as if!), all the graphics in this website have been completely designed and created by yours truly. I went for a quiet, lavender monochrome theme for this one, to give out a calm and (for the most part) sane atmosphere. My graphics are not mind-blowing, not a site for sore eyes, but it was quite a rather enjoyable endeavor, this building every little button from scratch and all, with only one's imagination to guide the mouse. For more of my own graphics, please visit the Journey of the Dragon, a fan website-under-construction, for my favorite martial artist and actor (This site, unfortunately, is still Internet Explorer-only). Perhaps my least-flawed site (in terms of web design) is Game, Set, Match--Chang!, a tribute site for the world's best tennis player (in my opinion).

Still, I decided to keep the old site, Chiyoryunami: The Dragon Wave Website, because despite the fact that I abandoned it a long time ago it still gets visitors who go as far as signing the guestbook (Thank you!) and emailing me (Thank you!).

I hope you have as much fun surfing through this Completely Claire Website as much as I had fun creating, designing and writing for it. It will be updated on a very regular basis so I hope you'll visit just as regularly.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy!