Technical Writing:	This is my bread-and-butter work. I write manuals, technical bulletins, help scripts, advertising copy, etc. I was an electronic engineer before I was a tech writer, so I interface well with engineers and other technical specialists.
Desktop Publishing:	The companies I work for don't have big publication departments, so the tech writer has to handle all aspects of document preparation and publishing. I can do my own page and document layout and prepress. I work closely with commercial printers and service bureaus to assure that the finished product looks like what the boss visualized. My primary desktop publishing tool is Adobe PageMaker (now version 6.5) running on a Win XP PC.
Graphics design:	I don't really have any credentials in design, but employers often have design needs and no budget. This makes artists out of the most unlikely people. I've learned what little I know about graphic arts the hard way: by designing things that nobody liked, then being told how to fix them by people who actually knew what they were doing (sometimes). My primary graphics tool is Adobe Photoshop.
Website Design:	This includes site design, HTML coding, graphics design and preparation, site management and promotion. I use a variety of tools when building a site, but avoid WYSIWYG HTML editors like FrontPage, for a variety of reasons. Please visit the How To page to get some idea of the techniques I use when putting a page together.

Hobbies and pastimes

But besides designing web pages that hardly anyone sees, I write fiction for fun (six unpublished novels so far) and play with computers and other technology. I have been a ham radio operator for over 20 years and have had the call sign WA6EFG for almost that long. But I don't get on the air much except for experimentation. I also enjoy messing with boats.

My wife and I are foster parents, and have found that the foster children, their families, and their support system (not to mention our own two children) occupy much of our spare time. If you are a foster parent or have dealings with that system and want to chat, feel free to send email.

(By the way, I suppose foster care doesn't properly fall in the "hobby" category, but anyone who has ever done it for any length of time would probably agree that it hardly qualifies as an occupation... at least not in terms of making money, or anything like that.)

Thanks for stopping by...