Short version. There is no short version with me. Why do you even ask? Yeah, you see, that's pretty much the story: either I don't talk much at all, or you get me going and I don't shut up until long after your eyes have glazed over.

Okay, how about this web stuff? Fair enough. I got started late one night in a conversation with one of the Daynotes Gang when I mentioned I could code a page more quickly by hand than with he could with a WYSIWYG (a more complete version of the story is here). The rest has been a steady (albeit slow) progression from simple tables-based pages, which I still use on my Daynotes site, to a blog with more of a styled look. ...and why more than one site? Well, the Daynotes pages get something on them every day, barring illness and certain vacations. ...and it's usually general family stuff with the occasional piece of tech thrown in. The blog serves as more of an outlet for the bits and pieces of things that strike me as either humorous or interesting. ...and some weeks, it turns into a photo blog. Which brings us to the other stuff...

What other stuff? Somewhere along the journey that started with posting techno-geekish stuff onto daily pages, I began to become aware of sites that I admired for their design as well as their content. ...and that led to some yearning to try once again to do something creative after fifty years of frustration. The first step was to start breaking some of the stories out from the archives and give them a page of their own (a work in progress as I review and select). I did an occasional photo bit; and with the encouragement from some really nice people, started working on splash pages and blending photography and words into the occasional art piece. Samples of both writings and design pieces are linked at the top of the Stories page and from the portal. Feel free to wander around...

What's with all that stuff over there anyway? Yeah, well, my interests vary and my motivation varies also. That leads to work on different sites at different times...

Tales from the street? I don't do too many of those, but every so often I'll get the urge to let one of the old stories bubble up to the surface again. You see, I've worked in the emergency services since 1969, first as a fireman, later as a fire medic and still later as a private sector medic. I left the streets in 1990 when Shelley and I got married, but I'm still with the same firm I've been with since the 1978 move to the private sector.

What about the tech stuff? I'm a geek, what can I say? I love knowing how things work and I love working on computers. I run both Win2k and Linux boxes and report on my adventures on my Daynotes pages. I don't like to color between the lines, so sometimes the results are interesting...

Tools? Okay... On the Linux side, it's Bluefish for editing, gFTP for moving bits and bytes about, and the Gimp for graphics. I browse with Konqueror or Galeon. The Windows side of the street gets the EditPlus HTML editor, with CoffeeCup's FTP client handling the the heavy lifting; Adobe's Photoshop Elements is my choice for the graphics work. Information on the cameras I use is here...

What's with the dots? Herb Caen, the master of three dot journalism... If you read the San Francisco Chronicle during his tenure, you'd know <g>. As it is, I'm enamored of the style as it fits the way my brain works.