I have collected a few tall ship photos from the web. Most of them are of a replica of the brig "Pilgrim", a hide trader on the California coast in the early 1800s, made famous in the book "Two Years Before the Mast" by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. The ship in the photos is not an exact replica, but rather a converted three-masted schooner. It is, nevertheless, a beautiful sight for a tall ship lover's eyes. Sailing has been my passion ever since I moved to Seattle in 1988. I started out with lessons at the Center for Wooden Boats back when Dick, the director taught them. After that I joined a singles' sailing club with a friend and sailed on a variety of boats. Eventually, I began crewing on racing boats, the last one being 'Airloom', a beautiful 40 foot Baba. I acquired my own sailboat in the fall of 2000, and started racing it late in 2002. With the help of some of Airloom's crew, 'Windswept', a San Juan 28, has managed to hold its own in a few local buoy races, managing a first place in the first race, and a third place for that first series. The top photo on the right is of Windswept and Airloom on the muddy bottom of Driftwood Key at low tide. The bottom photo is of Airloom under full sail, and the link will take you to another site that I built, but no longer maintain, airloom.org. In May of 2003, I was back aboard Airloom for the Oregon Offshore race from Astoria, Oregon to Victoria, British Columbia. After a couple of bouts with seasickness, I managed to enjoy the race, and am very grateful for the ocean racing experience, especially for the experience at the helm. Several years ago, I hooked up with a climbing group led by a gentleman named Joe Murphy whom I used to work with at WRQ in Seattle (not Cincinnati). My intention was to get back in shape, and I thought training to climb Mt Rainier would be a good way to do it. I soon discovered, however, that I was not in condition to even start training for a climb like Rainier. But I refused to give up and though there were times when I thought I was going to die, I stayed with it. We climbed Mt. St. Helens that year and I think Baker, but Rainier refused to cooperate. For the next five years I continued to climb with the group, and managed to summit Baker and Mt. St. Helens both a few times, and Rainier once, though we attempted it every year. Even though we sometimes didn't make it to the summit, we always had successful climbs with no injuries, and lots of great experiences. Unfortunately, Joe has suffered some health problems that have prevented him from climbing and since he was the organizing force behind the group, it has since fallen apart. I do miss the group and the climbing, but I will always retain fond memories of people and places, and personal summits challenged and conquered. I have put up a few photos of friends and life on a glacier. Hope you enjoy them. The 'Robotics' section of this site is not built yet. Partly because the robot lost it's brain in a sailing misfortune a couple of years ago, plus I have no pictures of the one I built. The 'robot' is a small 'table top' robot that I built following plans obtained from a website maintained by Carnegie Mellon University. All of the programming for the robot was in C, and C++, so I had to scramble a bit to learn enough to correct a few bugs and get the little guy going. Here's an update: I have finally acquired another Palm (m100) and have got the little guy going again. I have added a horizontal scanning sensor,and I still intend to add vertical scanning, and maybe limited verbal communication capabilities, but I am bumping up against the limits of the Palm's computing power which is causing me to start looking towards the next model, which will have a full computer on board (probably a laptop at first), webcams for image acquisition and ranging, and which will be a much larger, outdoor model. The added power of a regular computer will allow a lot more features, such as voice recognition, speech synthesis, and maybe even image processing, like edge detection (I'm hoping for a lot of help from a friend on this), which may allow some image recognition. Of course, a robot arm will have to be added eventually. I still have no photos except the one at right which is from the PPRK website. When I am not sailing or climbing, or working in my shop, I like to do a little web development. In fact, I thought I had a pretty good career going until the "dot-com crash". This site was developed completely by me, and I have several other sites that I am developing including airloom.org, which is the most complete. I've written almost all of the scripts, and made all of the graphics using mostly Adobe Photoshop. All of the sites I am developing are hosted on a shared server where I rent space. I can build and host private or commercial sites for a very reasonable rate, including domain name, e-mail, and shopping cart services. I am also willing to do contract work as well. Contact me about web services. Several years ago, my friend Tim started a business renting bikes and electric scooters at a park in Federal Way. On the weekends, I would often go down there and hang out with him. I would help out mostly by repairing scooters whenever they had a problem. Eventually, I began to realize that there weren't many places where someone could take their electric scooter to get it repaired, and I was getting more and more customers from Tim for my repair abilities. So finding myself unemployed in 2002, I put up a website, and later that year, officially started my own business. At first, I was working out of my home (my boat) and occasionally using my father's workshop. But soon, I could no longer fit the number of scooters I had to repair in my boat and had to lease shop space. Sometime in 2003, I went by an electric bike shop in Fremont and introduced myself to the owner. That's how I met Eric Sundin who runs Electric Bikes NW. He was wanting to phase out of scooters and concentrate on electric bikes, so he began referring all of his scooter customers to me, and eventually put up a link on his site to mine. That's when I really started to get busy. Eric was a lot of help, and I began to also sell new electric scooters. I sold only high quality scooters, and tried to offer prompt warranty service to my customers. At the end of September of 2003 I moved to a suite next to Eric's store on 36th in Fremont where there is a lot more drive-by and walk-by traffic, and since I was right next to Eric's shop, we were able to support each other well. Eventually, the electric scooter market was flooded with cheap, poor quality, imported scooters, and I could no longer sell quality scooters at higher prices. I tried to stay on business by learning to repair the cheap scooters, but there were countless different models and manufacturers, and I could not get parts for them. After endless hours spent trying to repair cheap scooters for not much money, I ran out of capital and had to close my doors. I still feel strongly that small electric vehicles are the easiest way to actually do something for the environment instead of just talking about it. I think they should be allowed everywhere bicycles are allowed. Electric scooters are zero air pollution vehicles. In Seattle where power is supplied by hydroelectric power plants, and the dams are all above any Salmon spawning grounds, there is literally no impact on the environment from the use of electric scooters. Even the batteries used are almost completely recycled (the lead-acid battery recycling program is among the most successful recycling programs in the U.S.).