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| Home |
| Home |
| Pre High School |
| High School |
| Fordham Univ. |
| Harrisburg PA |
| White Plains NY |
| Williamsport PA |
| State College |
| Utica NY |
| Wheeling WV |
| Woodsboro Md |
| Current Home |
| My Wife |
| My Kids |
| My Grandkids |
| My Parents |
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| Update History | |
| Update | Date |
| Added 5 paragraphs to the end of Current Home | July 31, 2005 |
| New photos of Susquehanna St. apartment and Harrisburg diesel house on Harrisburg page. | August 13, 2005 |
| Added photos of me jogging and Pennsylvania Hall at Gettysburg College to Woodsboro | August 13, 2005 |
| Modified some text about my wife Jean in the pre High School section and added pictures of Jean | August 21, 2005 |
| Inserted a section about my wife Jean into the High School page | September 16, 2005 |
| Inserted hunting experiences into the High School page and added a link to the yearbook web site | December 15, 2005 |
| Added a few paragraphs to the end of the pre High School page | December 15, 2005 |
| Established links to photo sites. (Immediately below) | March 20, 2007 |
| Click here to go to photo sites |
| This web site is essentially autobiographical. Consequently, this site structured chronologically. So, the links on the left largely represent the places in which I've lived, chronologically, from top to bottom. The last four represent my family and are, for the most part, links to other sites. I've been retired for a couple of years now and since I have more time on my hands I've been growing more and more introspective. The aging process also seems to have a stimulating impact on nostalgia. But, sharing remembrances with others is marginally successful with my own age group and considerably less so with those in other generations. Maybe my experiences are incredibly dull. When I see eyes glaze over I know it's time to shut up. But, I was the same way in my younger days. When my elders began relating their stories to me I listened politely but was always vigilant for an opportunity to head for the nearest exit. Now, one of my biggest regrets is that I did not take the time to be more inquisitive regarding the experiences of others. So, that's the reason for this web site. Others can partake of it when and if they want to. I must admit though, it must take a bigger than normal ego to go through the trouble of writing all this stuff. The photo of me, above, was taken at about mid life. I chose it because it exemplifies one of my personal traits that I never was able to get under control. That is, once I hit my teens, I became highly opinionated on most topics, even those that I knew little about. To add emphasis to my points, I had the habit of jabbing imaginary holes through the space in front of me with my index finger. I had almost no respect for the opinions of others and made them aware of their inferior, (I thought), insights, with all sorts of physical gestures aimed at strengthening my verbalizations. I did not suffer fools very well. To those more sensitive to these tactics, they either avoided discussions with me or ramped up the vigor of their declarations. As a result I may have earned grudging respect from some but, endeared myself to few. This personal characteristic was evident throughout my professional career, even with my superiors. It grew substantially with superiors for whom I had little respect and was tempered considerably with those superiors I considered competent in their roles. But the nature of human nature is such that few people can successfully compensate for their insufficiencies and self interests to adequately achieve true leadership qualities. Throughout my career I've only had two individuals who earned my deep respect as leaders. They were inspirational and instilled people with an enthusiasm for providing excellent service or producing reliable quality products. Interactions, then, with most of my superiors was not good. I regarded them with a subliminal contemptuousness that I was not very good at disguising. Consequently, I've had a rocky career with more than the usual number of employers and lived in a number of different communities. Oddly, most of the positions I've held had titles of supervisor, manager, director and even assistant professor. All required an ability to motivate people. I was not very good at it. I attempted to emulate bosses who were successful at it. I studied motivation at the college level, I pondered and read and read and pondered. All to no avail. Finally, I came to the conclusion that charisma and visceral verbal skills were crucial factors in motivating others. I had little of both. I instead intellectualized motivation to death. So, I guess, my only redeeming characteristic was,.... I cared. This site is being worked on continuously. Much of it is incomplete. I work on it when the mood strikes me. Or, I'll make changes when those who are willing to be painfully honest with me tell me I'm lying, embroidering the text, hurting someone or just plain wrong. |
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| Web Page Development Anguish I've recently been involuntarily retired and since almost all my jobs had been computer related, I suppose it was quite natural for me to gravitate to the realm of constructing web pages. Throughout my professional career I never had the opportunity to work on internet stuff so, I had to learn how to go about putting them together. I took a web page design course at a local high school, a course that focused on using Microsoft Word as a design tool. My first attempt was my high school graduating class yearbook. It took me several weeks of intense work to get it all done but soon discovered that it was so big that its space requirements made it impractical to install on any of the available free servers. So, I shelved the yearbook project and went to work developing a site for my wife. I completed my wife's site and installed it at Geocities. However, this too turned out to be impractical because it took forever for the initial page to load. The culprit in this case was the size of the photographs I was using. It didn't take too long to learn what the optimum photo size was so I reconstructed my wife's web site and solved the loading problem. But, that turned out to be unsatisfying because I was still using Microsoft Word as a development tool. If one examines the HTML document that Microsoft Word generates, it looks like it strives to satisfy the requirements of every web browser that anyone ever developed. To satisfy that goal it obviously was necessary for Microsoft Word to generate huge amounts of HTML code. This then, imposed limitations on the size of any web site I may want to develop. To deal with this problem, for me then, it was necessary to learn to write the required HTML code directly. But now that I'm writing my HTML code directly, and since I am far from an expert in this area, it leaves my web sites vulnerable to the vagaries of browser differences. I do my testing with the browsers from Microsoft, Netscape, a browser that I wrote for myself using Visual Basic, and more recently, Firefox. In most cases I think I'm compensating for differences. Unfortunately I have no idea how other browsers might gunk up my work. |