About the Site and Author of NorCalScan.org

Back to NorCalScan.org Who is Jake Hickok? Just HOW is this site made? The History of NorCalScan How do I get a hold of Jake?

Don Root, Jake Hickok, Tim Tribble, and Harry Marnell

So just who am I? Some of you know me and some of you don't. I'm just someone who enjoys many activites in life, and I'm still getting myself involved in more activities. I am 24 years old and married to the most beautiful bride I can imagine, Kim. That's my main hobby right now ;) I enjoy sharing the Lord with her and spending lots of time together, learning about life and each other. We're very happy.

I am working full time at a local High School in the Information Technologies Department. The department contracts out technicians to county schools for tech support and to maintain their tech department. With the free time around that I am the photographer for the Red Bluff City Fire Dept. A wonderful hobby of mine, it gets me in places I just don't want to leave at times ;) A wonderful department and comrades, I will enjoy staying here and possibly joining the ranks as an actual reserve firefighter in the next few years.

To finish that off, somewhere in there I give drum lessons to some students, specializing in advanced jazz percussion and beginning elementary percussion. I play around the northstate with jazz combos for weddings, dances, and private parties. You can find me on most Sundays playing along with my wife at the Red Bluff First Church of God in the Praise and Worship team kicking a few beats around.
A hobby that got shoved to the side - but I attained my goal - is Karate. I obtained my black belt in 1995 in American style Karate. That was quite an experience and the knowledge and experience will always be with me. I'm just waiting for that small hole to open up so I can join again and just stay in shape and have some fun. So that explains my busy life and who I am. I love it.

Well, for starters, it is all handwritten code. That's the reason it takes a lot of time. The reason for the code writing though is because it keeps the crap code out of my site that commercial code programs always put in. I am also in full control of how the site looks. I also learn about code and because I know the code I can easily fix a problem or tweak something that would require code hacking in a code program.

The photos are all hand created using Adobe Photoshop for Macintosh. Digital pics are put together to create images that sometimes look like the same thing. Take Fire Center 2003 for instance, those firefighters have nothing to do with the fire (a campfire up close), or the fire truck (sitting in a parking lot with the lights "active" from tapping a red and white paint brush in Photoshop.) There are also lens flare effects I use to make lights look like they're on.

Some sections are sometimes produced using helper programs for the sole purpose of saving time. The Photo Gallery was produced using Better HTML Export in iPhoto on Macintosh OS X. I have checked the entire code to make sure there isn't any "crap" code that doesn't match current web standards. If every page looks like it's the same kind - like a template or something, that's because I designed it that way. Everything is as uniform as I can make it to ease in navigation of the program. These aren't prefabircated templates or anything. If it does look like other websites, that's because those websites opted for the familiar layout of title on top, navigate on left and body content on right.

Some other websites I've produced in the day include the RBHS Performing Arts Center website. This website is still looking almost exactly the same as I left it (back in 1997) with the same pictures and menu maps. Unfortunetely nobody has updated it or if they have, it's scattered all over and my name is still attached. Another site recently made is the Reeds Creek School District although once again I left it to a local teacher who since has "defaced" it with Microsoft Front Page - oh I HATE that program ;) I also tought the HTML and CSS codes to the designer of the Evergreen School District Website and helped with some design and code aspects of the site.

As for the server it resides on, I use ZimCom as a webhosting solution. Lots of great features for a wonderful price, and great people to work with too! Thanks Nick and Jason!

The history of this website goes back to my high school days when the Internet was just taking shape. We were the first school in Northern California to go "online" and I was the first student with a homepage. Unfortunetely I don't have a copy of that page but I enjoyed it. Think Netscape 1.0 days. Seriously! Gray background, no pictures, just text. Yuck. Then HTML got a little better and I incorporated pictures and backgrounds. Then the first popular search engine was made and I realized there was an Internet beyond Yahoo directories ;) My website expanded as technology did, and the interests I put into it ranged from drums and music to radio shortly afterwards.

If you want to get a hold of me the image below has my e-mail address. I never put my e-mail in a website again due to the large amounts of spam. 100 a day is not fun. All from spambots grabbing e-mail addresses from this site.