About the home page

I think I took this photo about 1973.

It's not the first photo or first roll of film, but it was when I was just getting interested in photography.

It's the back yard of our house on 13th Avenue in Munhall, Pa. This is my brother, Tim (on the right), wrestling with my best friend, Eric Werder.

We had moved to Pennsylvania just four years before. At that time, Pittsburgh was still a steel city, although as children we had no idea that the industry was in decline. It didn't really make much difference, because my father didn't work in the mill, even though we lived just five blocks from it. He worked in a machine shop in Duquesne, not far from his brother and mother, and he visited them each week without fail.

My father grew up in McKeesport, but we kids had only known California. The transition from California to Pittsburgh in 1969 wasn't an easy one. Aside from the weather, there was Los Angeles and Pittsburgh culture. The public schools seemed behind ... everything seemed behind.

Because of my teen angst or arrogance, I lost touch with Eric. Another big mistake in my life.

The name

My name was created in a 3-D imaging program. In this case, I used Micrografx Simply 3D, which had been produced by an independent software company before being bought by Micrografx, which in turn was acquired by Corel. Most of the Micrografx products eventually were killed off. Nice work, Corel.

Anyway, what I wanted to do here was to create a chrome look. It took me a half an hour or so to tinker with it enough to get the look that I wanted. Then I simply exported as a TIFF and converted to a high-rez JPG, which is still just roughly 12k in size.

The rollovers

Seemed rather simple, but in this case, having the rollover swap out the primary photo became a different problem. The primary photo has to be assigned a name, and my initial Javascript wouldn't allow me to assign three names to a single image, which was required for this piece of Javascript code.

Some hunting around the Web finally located the Javascript code that I needed. Essentially, the mouseover action calls two Javascript functions: 1) swap out the white text image for the highlighted version, and 2) swap out the primary photo for the desired one. And the mouseout then swaps in the original text image and the original primary photo.

Problem solved. If you want to do this yourself, drop me a note or just steal the scripting.

About the rollover photos

My desk in Hong Kong. Things sometimes got hectic, so papers and things would begin to accumulate. Hmmm, my work desk here in Pittsburgh is looking pretty much the same. Same reason.