Fort Stevens, Oregon – Excellent Adventure 2023
I was an aspiring drummer 🥁 in high school who became a nuclear engineer ⚛ and never worked a day as a nuclear engineer 😳. I am a child of the 60s ☮.
Then, a fascinating journey through life took me from testing airplanes ✈️ to designing websites as 🖥 I toiled away for 39 years in high tech. With stops at Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, Autodesk, IBM, and some smaller tech companies and start-ups. Basically, I was a geek ⚛.
My Career in Pictures
I landed where it started on the ‘spaced coast’ of Florida 😏. I have been retired for a couple of years, an orphan, close to my two brothers and their families, and very few close friends.
I grew up in the almost surreal world of America’s space program. I saw my Dad launch the earliest uncrewed rockets up through the Space Shuttle 🚀. One brother went that route. As a kid, I loved to build and make stuff – erector sets, tinker toys, you name it. I was a geek from an early age.
I left Florida to pursue my dreams and travel the world. I made it to 4 out of seven continents and 39 countries. I lived in Stuttgart, Germany, for three years 🍺. I dove and underwater photographed the Caribean, Central America, Australia, and the South Pacific 🐠.
I lived at 29 different addresses 🏠. I was married three times 💍- five if you count the first marriage in the Catholic Church in my flip-flops (which I guess is still on the books) and number 2 whom I had the unfortunate pleasure of marrying twice 😵💫! It was all very confusing.
I learned DIY from my Dad and spun that into a minor in fine craftsmanship as a woodworker 🪚. I have played the drums since junior high school and have amassed an extensive collection of drums 🥁. I have loved contemporary music since I started drumming – especially anything different with a beat. I bought my first camera in college and love to capture my world in images. I loved using technology to help me do all this. I realized later in life that creation is my true passion.
I discovered reading in college and am an ardent fan of science fiction 🚀 and fantasy. All of Tolkien’s works, especially Lord of the Rings, are my all-time favorite, which I have read countless times. I dig all sci-fi: Rodger Zelazny, Arther Clarke, Issac Asimov, Kim Stanley-Robinson, Neal Stephenson, John Varley, and James S. A. Corey, among others. Seeing all my favorite sci-fi and fantasy books turned into TV shows and movies is astounding.
I like to smoke pot quite a bit but gave up drinking twice 🍾. I love to sit in the hot tub to relax 🛀. I love hiking with my dog and taking pictures of nature 🌼. I love being on a boat in the ocean or the nearby Indian River Lagoon 🚤. I love creating stuff out of wood for personal pleasure and giving as gifts 🔨.
I have an RV, the Starship Excellent Adventure, and traveled the western rim of the Rockies 🏔 in 2021, the Appalachians 🗻 in 2022, and the Big Kahuna tour of the left coast in 2023 with my pup Jake.
I love dogs 🐶. All dogs are good dogs. I aspire to be the person my dog thinks I am. I try my best to be good to my dog and treat him like a tribe member.
I used to consider myself a spiritual person 👼🏻 but now consider myself a very lucky bipedal mammal 🐵 with a large cranium and opposable thumbs who gets to experience the beauty of life and nature 🌲 ⛈ with no belief in a creator. It’s all math – as they say ∑.
We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I am, however, an ordained minister of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
I can believe in made-up nonsense as well as the next guy 🤩 – but mainly because it allows me to cast out false prophets.
I am also an ardent enthusiast of everything Dude.
Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not “Mr. Lebowski”. You’re Mr. Lebowski. I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
The Dude
42?
Life, The Universe and Everything?
*
Don’t Panic!
42 in binary code
While it may not be significant to base 13, the number 42 is a significant number in binary code, where it is represented as 101010. This particular pattern of zeros and ones appears often in mathematical and computer-related contexts.
42 in Buddhism and Hinduism
The number 42 is also significant in some Eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Many believe a person reaches Nirvana or Moksha, the final goal of life, around age 42. Of course, there is no actual set age for this experience.
42 in Christianity
The Bible also mentions the number 42 many times. In the Book of Revelation, for example, the number 42 is associated with the 42 months that the Antichrist will rule over the world. In another instance, 42 is the number of generations from Abraham to Jesus Christ.
42 and the angle of a rainbow
The angle at which light reflects off water to create a rainbow is 42 degrees.
42 and the speed of light crossing a proton
Two physical constants in the universe are the speed of light and the diameter of a proton. It takes light 10 to the minus 42nd power seconds to cross the diameter of a proton.
42 and the asterisk symbol
Forty-two is the ASCII code for the symbol *, also known as the asterisk. This symbol is often thought to translate to anything or everything. In this instance, 42 = everything, the meaning of life.
I spend a lot of time understanding the nature of the universe – helped by my background in math and physics. I closely follow and understand peer-reviewed science, which has led me to the conclusion the world we live in is truly unique but not supernatural. My heroes are all the thinkers and scientists at the Solvay Conferences – Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg – among others – plus those that came later, like Richard Feynman and Allan Turing, and those that came before, like Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus.
Oh yes – and all my favorite musicians. Good thing for that large cranium!
I believe we live in a delicate balance with nature 🦋 and we have unfortunately tipped the scales in our favor. The dinosaurs 🦕 got like 150 million years – humanity will be lucky to get 1 million – start to finish. So much for those oversized craniums 🤣.
*