George Brown Petty IV drew Sheiglagh when he was still working on Esquire Magazine. I do not know what he called this particular work. But, I liked the idea of the 1930's cheesecake girls so when I was looking for an identity for the web, I decided to use this. And this picture of Sheiglagh started my quest to see more works of George Petty. Why did I choose Sheiglagh as a name? The name means girl and I wanted Sheiglagh to be just a girl. No pretensions. Little did I know that time that Sheiglagh will develop into her own person, like cyber-personas do.

I saw Sheiglagh as sassy, impertinent and fun loving. But as she developed, she started breaking new frontiers. I started using her as my character in chat rooms first. Then as time went on, and I decided to put up a web page, I noticed that nothing was actually on the web to help out visual merchandisers like me to get our jobs done. So, Sheiglagh became the icon for the Fashion Windows webpages. Her face graced all the front page and the links. In short, she became her own person, separate from me. I became Sheiglagh's code writer, the person behind her. And in the tradition of writers, Sheiglagh became my nom de guerre

Petty Girl

Sheiglagh

Sheiglagh took some of her qualities from me. She became an artist and a visual merchandiser, which I am both in RL. But, she became more than me also. She did not have her head high up in the clouds. She was down to earth and logical, and lacked the infamous artist's temper. And Sheiglagh broke another new ground. She became an Artificial Intelligence Program. Learn more about Sheiglagh, the AI Program