Maggie the WonderDog

Hi, I'm Maggie. I was born on January 15 of 1994, which makes me something of a very old lady now. I have had a long and interesting life.

I was adopted from the PetSmart at Cobb Town Center into a big house in Woodstock, Georgia. I had lots of land to run on, a big yard in a nice neighborhood. Dad loves dogs, but mom didn't much care for me even though she was the one who wanted to adopt me. She wanted me in a cage, and not on the furniture. What's the point to a dog who cannot be a member of the family.

That was probably because she forced dad to give up another dog he loved years ago. Dad did not want to get another dog because he could not go through the trauma of loosing another.

All in all, it was a good puppyhood. I was out in the country with wild raspberry bushes across the street, and next to a cow pasture. I liked to eat the raspberries while wandering the neighborhood. Leash laws did not exist or were not enforced and all the neighbors had dogs. We would wander free nearly every day. One day the cows escaped and I herded them all into my back yard when I was only a year old.

Here I am herding an escaped cow. There was a dairy farm bordering our subdivision. My record was to herd six cows into the back yard.

Back then dad worked for IBM in the erstwhile Eduquest Division. Although he was responsible for testing products on new hardware, he was very aware of Eduquest's failure to address the Internet. As a result he started the web site Maggie's Guide to the Internet to help teachers understand how to use the Internet in the classroom because there were few web sites devoted to that purpose without advertising at the time.

That website became very popular with K-12 teachers, receiving over 30,000 hits per month (a big number for a web site in the early 1990's) while the Eduquest site was getting less than a third of that. It was written up in Internet Magazine (September 1995 issue) and shown on CNN in a feature on the Internet in the classroom. The Department of Education's ERIC site features it as did the University of South Carolina and University of Illinois. Many teachers learned to use the Internet because of my web site.