Once upon a time, in a land not far from interesting and exotic places (but not exciting in its own right) lived a young woman named Marianne Waage. Born in Springfield, Illinois, she had moved to this town, Novato, when she was the tender age of three.

Much time elapsed. As it was Novato, nothing of great note occurred.

Her father, Ed, kept up with the rapidly expanding personal computer industry. Marianne, accompanied by her older brother Erik, grew up using the many variants of the x86 computers. She became fairly knowledgeable with the arcana of MS-DOS commands and IBM compatible hardware.

Her mother, Reidun, ran an antique business in the nearby antique capital, San Anselmo. She often designed her own jewelry, and passed this skill on to her daughter.

After attending San Marin High School for her freshman year, she decided to eschew the normal routes, and enrolled at NOVA Independent Studies. While there, she developed a passion for, of all things, desktop publishing. She became the editor for the Vox NOVA, her school literary rag, for two years. Although her primary responsibility lay in page layout and graphic design, she usually took care of content and copy editting as well.

At the age of 18, she graduated from NOVA, and was accepted into the University of California, Davis. This came as quite a surprise, as Marianne was the first at her relatively new independent studies program to get into a four year university directly. She entered with the intent to get a Computer Science degree.

She then realized that, though there was a Design program at Davis, there was no minor for it. She switched her major from Computer Science to Design, with emphasis on computer graphics, and the intent to get a CS minor.

Marianne has now been vainly attempting to get into her classes. She expects to be at Davis for five years, hopefully graduating in 2000 or 2001. She's taken many computer related jobs, with the hopes of eventually landing a job involving web pages or, less likely, desktop publishing in some fashion. She's been spending a ridiculous amount of time recently working on not quite archaic hardware and playing with Adobe Photoshop.