Abstract
In engineering as well as other disciplines, an abstract is a summary or overview of a report or similar body of work. Here I use the term for this page which briefly describes various portions of my webpage. Any written work can at best give the reader a little glimpse of the character of the man behind the words. This website is no exception. While I share a very little of who I am here, it would be shear foolishness for someone to think he knew what I was all about from reading these pages. With this in mind, let us proceed with the tour of the place, and thank you for your visit. [11/10/03]

Journal
From trade journals to diaries, the journal means very different things to different peaple. In order to communicate new ideas, it is best to have broad terms whose minutia must be determined from context. And so it is actually benificial from one term to have a broad meaning and the various uses of journal is a case in point. The journal found here is a flexible and public outlet where I, the writer, may share whatever information I wish. It is not constrained by some formal idea of what style for writing should be used or what topics covered. That all sounds pretty hight and wonderful, but experience will no doubt show you, my reader, that all this really means is that I am at liberty to put the mundane and uninteresting before you. And I am certainly at liberty to put nothing here for months at a time or to put a dozen somethings in an hour. [11/10/03]

Essays
An essay, at least for the purposes of this section, is a compact paper about a certain topic (a monograph). It will generally express a belief or opinion. Some of these start out as journal entries, but then they are deemed important enough to be further refined and stored together where they can be more easily reached by topic (as apposed to a journal entry which is most easily found by date). It is possible for an essay which is not really finished to be listed here. I generally find myself far too busy and I may decide to go ahead and publish an essay in an unfinished form because I think it should be read. I may well edit any of them after publishing them, and I don't expect that I will be putting version numbers on them, so be aware that they could change. I may eventually decide to put last modified dates on individual essays, but at this point, I'm not sure that that is necessary. Sharing ideas is a main point in associating with other people, so a collection of essays is an important part of a person's web page. If you are to learn something about me, it would be helpful to know what I think about various things. Although time constraints will limit what is here, I none-the-less believe that this is an important component of this overall document of who I am. A web page is really something like a resume: it attempts to encapsulate who the author is, even though the reason for writing a web page is generally quite different than the reason for a resume.

Websites
I mentioned in my welcome that I have written other web pages. Some of them are still available in various states of completeness. This section provides links to those pages. It also includes links to places of interest to me. These include the web pages of friends, schools I've gone to, software I find useful, and so on.

E'books
Books are wonderful, and a nicely bound, nicely type set printed version is really the nicest way to read a book. Even so, there is a certain convenience in have books in electronic form. Searching and compact storage are two advantages that come to mind. For such reasons, I have found it worthwhile to begin collecting a few electronic texts. I have a Handspring Visor, and I like to have several books stored on it so I will have something to read without having to always carry a book with me. The books in this collection are in palm document format or plain text. Often they are in both. All of these books are in the public domain, at least so far as I know, so they can be used without restriction.

Photographs
Taking pictures is something that lots of people like to do, and may of those people don't get out and do it as often as they would like to. Well, I am generally no exception to this. While I like taking pictures, I often find myself without a camera when there is something good to photograph. Despite this, I have managed to take some pictures. The next thing that keeps them from all showing up here as that they must be scanned, cropped, resized, or whatever it may take to make them presentable. After that, there's the matter of organizing them on a web page in a coherent manner. All these factors have worked against my past attempts to offer much of a photo archive. Despite this, I have not give up and persist in having a section devoted to photography. I hope you like what I have and aren't disappointed that there aren't more pictures, that they aren't cropped better, or whatever.

Programs
Programming is one of the fun things that can be done with computers. Some of the things I've written are available here. There may also be a program or two that I just compiled for my preferred operating system, BeOS. If you know much about such things, you will know that the company that produced this system (Be Inc.) has gone out of business, largely thanks to Microsoft. As you might imagine, this does not endear me to said software giant. At any rate, BeOS is not dead. The final version was made available to the public for free and so is still available. Meanwhile, the OpenBeOS project is reproducing this great platform. I will likely include some screen shots in the hobbies section. I have a couple of Windows programs available, some BeOS programs, and some Python programs that are pretty much platform independent.

Hobbies
Everyone has hobbies right? It is certainly something you are often asked about when you are first getting to know someone. Is a hobby anything that one has an interesting in, or is it something that one also does a certain amount of? At any rate, as mentioned above, I should put some screen shots of my computer here so you have some idea what BeOS looks like in case you've never seen it. I suppose I should mention things like hiking and camping here. Perhaps I'll tell about some of my outings in this section. Then there is coin collecting (I guess that makes me a numismatist). I guess I should mention my love for reading and for words in this section. What appears here is bound to be a diverse collection as it is a sort of catch-all for the things that didn't get their own section.