Upon arriving at my web page, you might have wondered who I am. Well, here's the place where I tell you.

My Life So Far (including the gritty bits)

I was born the youngest of three in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.  For a few years, I probably had a fairly normal childhood, but before too long, my brother was diagnosed with cancer.  These days are pretty fuzzy in my memory.  During this time we lived in Vancouver, BC for a year as my parents looked for a treatment to help him, but they discovered that the Children's Hospital in Winnipeg was the place to be.  At the age of seven, I went to my brother's funeral.

Time passed fairly uneventfully in my life until my father took a sabbatical from the University and worked for the Canadian International Development Agency in Kenya, East Africa.  The place we moved to was quite a change from Winnipeg.  Nakuru is fairly near the equator but is at a relatively high altitude, giving us a nice uniform temperature all year round. Quite a change from the +30C in summer to -40C in winter that we experienced in Winnipeg. We moved into a spacious home, acquired some servants, and settled down to a "normal" life. I'm sure that some of you amazed at the thought of servants, but out there they were the norm.  It was pretty much required that we have servants - it would provide work for a few of the locals, but they weren't what you see in the movies.  We had a married couple and his brother working for us.  The man initially was supposed to help with the cleaning until we discovered that he was stealing from us, and we moved him to the garden (which he helped himself to).  His brother was supposed to be the "guard" - basically a glorified gate-opener when we'd come home late.  He'd always be asleep however, so we'd have to open the gate ourselves.  If it hadn't been for the man's wife, we'd probably have looked for different people - she did the laundry and helped clean in the house, and was a really nice person.  I believe my mother is still in contact with her.

From 1982 to 1984 we lived there, and I went to a local British private school. Greensteds was quite an experience in itself: uniforms, boarding students and school lunches were new things for me.  I was a day student, so each morning a "bus" (large van) would pick me up on the way to school, and would bring me home at night.  I don't think the bus was ever cleaned in the two years I took it.  At one point the driver used it to haul some wheat, and after a while there were a few plants growing under the seats.  Lunch was also an interesting and sometimes disturbing time.  When I came to school, someone told me that I should claim that I was a vegetarian, and perhaps that might have been a good thing to do.  One meal in particular remains firmly in my mind... our lunch was shepherds pile er, I mean pie, and I found a fly in my offering.  Perhaps it was the only fly ever to become trapped within this vile concoction, but it has certainly coloured my thoughts regarding this "food".

Life was fairly boring in general.  Seeing animals is fascinating for a while, but after seeing about a gazillion zebra, and most of the planet's flamingos, the interest wanes quickly. I'm not kidding about flamingos even, we lived on the side of an extinct volcano overlooking Lake Nakuru, and all around the lake was a pink band.  We had no television set, and even if we had one there was only one channel.  There just seemed to be nothing to do most of the time.  For something to do, one of my friends dug a trench in their back yard (ok, got a servant to dig it for him), so we could play war more convincingly.

The one thing that was really great about living in Kenya, was all the traveling we got to do.  My father seemed to be quite good at taking us along a meandering route between where we started and our destination, and even more amazingly managed to find friends of his to show us around at almost all our stops.  It seems that his graduate students from university scattered to the four winds, and were always happy to let us stay with them.  These trips really spoiled me for later life the few times I'd go on packaged tours - nothing compares to actually experiencing a culture, with real people.  The places we visited between Canada and Kenya include: Egypt, England, Greece, India, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

When we moved back to Canada, we resumed our old lives.  When my father took his sabbatical, he found a replacement from Germany who rented our house and took care of our cat and dog.  The dog now understood German, but life was pretty much the same as it had been before we left for Kenya.  Recognizing that computers were becoming important, my father purchased an IBM PC for scary amounts of money.  It was an incredible machine, two low density 5.25" floppy drives and a WHOPPING 640K of memory.  I distinctly remember people asking how we would ever use that much memory... a few years later when I bought an Amiga 2000 with 3MB of RAM, I heard the same question again... and again with my Amiga 3000 running with 10MB.  When I bought my current machine with 128MB, I didn't hear anyone asking - perhaps I stopped listening to those silly people, or perhaps it's just that they knew I was running Windows. <barf>

Anyway, back to my history lesson: the next time I got to travel was in 1988 when I took a trip with the school to the Soviet Union (ie. before the collapse of communism).  It was an interesting trip, though I think it would have been much better if it hadn't been for some of my classmates.  I don't know what they were thinking, but it appeared to me that some of them had just come along so they could get drunk every night.  A stop in Finland on the way home provided me with perhaps the worst pizza I ever experienced.  Ordering a ham and pineapple pizza, we were greeted with a pizza covered with spam and crushed pineapple - it tasted horrible, and some of the drunker members of the group tossed some out the window.  The next morning while walking down the street I looked down, wondered who had vomited, and realized that I was looking at a slice of this pizza.

The next year provided me with more travel.  My father had some business in the far east, and my mother and I went with him.  Japan, Korea and Hong Kong (with a day trip into China) were our stops this journey.  In Japan we stayed with my cousins, and got to experience a bit of what Tokyo is really about.  My uncle and aunt had adopted several Japanese kids, and one day I went to visit the school of one of the younger ones.  It was all in Japanese and I had no idea why they were throwing beans at each other until later when I found out it was Setsubun day - and the beans were just part of the ritual.  I don't really remember much about Kored note.<smirk> When we got to Hong Kong I was mostly better, and I spent most of my time wandering around the streets, just looking at everything.  It's an interesting sensation to walk along extremely busy sidewalks, but be able to see everything since everyone's shorter than you are.

It was almost 10 years later before I went abroad again, and I've got that trip described in detail elsewhere in this web site.

I first became interested in computer graphics in 1982 or '83, when a visitor to our home in Kenya brought a computer magazine that had a few ads for some really early 3d games.  I don't remember how much pestered my dad to get a computer, but after returning to Canada in 1984 he bought an IBM PC, and a little later even bought me a mouse which came with a rudimentary drawing program.  The IBM was very limited as to what it could do without the purchase of an expensive graphics card and expensive software, but one day my father came home from a business trip with some interesting news.  He had been to a conference in Toronto, and in the same hotel he stayed in, there was a computer show for a machine called an Amiga.  It sounded like a truly amazing machine, and after not much discussion, he ordered one.  The Amiga 2000 was truly amazing, and with it I started to play around with 3D graphics.  The first package I used was called Videoscape 3D - which was incidentally written by the man who makes Lightwave 3D today.  The way Videoscape 3D worked, was to give it a text file filled with numbers, and after processing it, it would return a picture.  To describe an object in this file, you would first type in the coordinates of all of the points, and then list the points that would be used to create each polygon in your object, as well as what colour the polygon would be.  It was long, tedious work to do anything, and I wish I still had the pictures I made.  I realized, however, that this was not the way I wanted to work, and so after studying the magazines, bought a copy of Turbo Silver.  With it, I could actually build objects on the screen and do some animation. Through playing with this program, I came to learn that my Amiga 2000 with 3MB of ram was not powerful enough.  I discovered this one day after trying to render an image and having the machine crash.. It had been rendering for 3 days before it ran out of memory at 30% complete.  I bought an Amiga 3000 with 10MB of memory which served me well through upgrading from Turbo Silver to Imagine (which is still around today), and finally moving onto a different program: Real 3D (I'm currently looking forward to beta test the new version).