The Den

Here's the picture I took for the logo in the header above. Its a bottle of one of my favorite single malt scotch whiskies, Glenfarclas 17 year-old. There's also a stemmed single malt glass that I got in Halifax, Nova Scotia from Nova Scotian Crystal. It actually contains a dram of 30 year-old Glenfiddich. Between them is one of my pipes, and if you look carefully you can see a whisp of smoke rising high above it. In the back is my hand-bound visitors book, which I hope you'll write in when you come to my house.

I first set up a personal web page in 1996, shortly after returning from a 9 month trip around the world. I did it mainly to learn html. Since I'm in the IT biz, I figured it would be useful to know.

It wasn't an outlet for any literary or artistic urges, or to give myself a platform from which to spread my opinions, but rather another tool for my more technical creative urges.
I also recognized the usefulness for sharing photos and info with friends and family around the world.

By the time I went cycling around the Northwest in 2002, I was using it along with an email list to send regular updates and share my experience. But I still did everything the simple way, hand-editing my html files to add content to my pages.
Then I finally got a digital camera in 2003, and had started hosting the pages on my own web server, so it was a natural thing to install photo gallery software. But I was still hand-editing the rest of the site, and not doing it very often - it was very out of date.

After my trip to New Zealand in Dec. 2006, I realized that if I updated it a little more often, and told more people about it, it might actually get used a little more. In order to make that simpler I followed the lead of my friend Allen, and installed a 'content management system' called  Drupal. Now I can add and remove stuff and have it look decent without having to hand-code each page. Drupal also ties in directly to my existing photo gallery server (called, appropriately, gallery ).

So here it is - an odd collection of stuff from my life online and offline over the years. I'll try to keep it a little more up to date, and please feel free to get in touch if you have any requests. Comments are welcome on any of the pages that let you post them.
Many thanks to everyone in my life who helps make it fun and interesting, but notably to my family in New England, my friend Jeremiah for inspiring many interests I didn't know I had, and my New Zealand family , for reawakening a whole chapter of my younger life.

Peace,

-Chris

PS: Here's a larger version of the logo image in the header.

Here's how to contact me in more ways than anyone should care about, starting with...

Email from this very page:

Click this!

Postal:

Phone:

Email:

     My first name @alumni.reed.edu

Instant Messaging:

• AIM/iChat: glenfarclas17 
• Yahoo: glenfarclas17 
• GoogleTalk: glenfarclas17
  
• Jabber: glenfarclas17 @ talk.google.com 
• Skype: glenfarclas17

Text to my phone:

You can send SMS messages to my cell phone from:

• Your cell phone: to 1-510-326-2696
  
• Email: to chrisl-pager@(my employer) dot com 
• AIM/iChat: to +15103262696

1. New Phone Number! Since I'm a little more centralized here in the SF Bay Area, I'm getting my own cell phone service (my mom bought me the previous service when I started travelling). Check out the contact page.
2. Believe it or not, I've just bought a motor vehicle! Not just any motor vehicle, but a 1988 VW Westfalia Camper Van. I'm planning to use it as a "home base" in the bay area and for my travels until its time to have a real residence again.

Continuing through the winter at Pixar. I've met lots of new and special people this time in the East Bay, I also recently (finally) got a digital camera, so I'll be able to put pictures on line. I'll try to keep a selection of people, places, and scenes around me. I'll see if I can get a fresh one up every couple months, but don't hold me to that. If you'd like to see my non-travel-related photos, send me an email and I'll give you the URL where they can be found at the moment.

Summer 2003 is winding down and its time to head back to the west coast. Two bike tours and my niece's first birthday party made for a full season. Now I'm heading back to Portland, from which I'll attend Burning Man 2003, and then I'll be cycling back down to the Bay Area for another contracting stint at Pixar.