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I live in a small beach town called Encinitas, which is approximately 20 miles north of San Diego, California, USA. For some reason, I have lived here all my life, and loved it. I have done a little bit of world travelling, and have visited Alberta Canada, Baja California, the Yucatan, London & Stratford-Upon-Avon England (where I got to stand in awe within the stone circle at Stonehenge), Paris France, Japan, Bavaria, and Austria. There are many more places I wish to visit and learn about, including much of the USA. In the United States, I have backpacked through the California redwoods and the Borrego desert, studied the tundra in the Colorado rockies, steamed up the Mississippi in the Delta Queen paddleboat, goofed off at Disneyworld and Wet-n-wild in Orlando Florida, camped and hiked through Zion and the Grand Canyon and Yosemete, relaxed on my honeymoon at a Kona Hawaii coffee plantation & B&B, and I even caught a firefly in Missouri once.
Besides my children and my delightful wife, other things that put a smile on my face are a
good dose of cream soda and chocolate chip cookies, traveling around the world,
camping, drinking wonderful
fresh-ground coffee
(recognize my dragon?), writing Macintosh software, relaxing with a cup of Kahlua,
and listening to waves caress the shore.
It may seem unusual for a computer programmer, but I don't spend much time playing computer games. However, there are a few that I do thoroughly enjoy. Here are some of my favorites:
I was raised with Classical music, and enjoy listening to a wide
range of genres, from Renaissance through neo-classical. Some of my
favorite composers, carefully listed in the order in which I just now
thought of them, are:
J.S. Bach, Prokofiev, Telemann, Beethoven, Stravinski, Weber, Dvorak, Saint
Saens, Wagner, Tchaikovski, PDQ Bach, Borodin, ...
Of course, the rock influence
didn't pass me by either, and I also deeply enjoy
Pink Floyd, The Cars, Foreigner, Tangerine Dream, Led Zeppelin, Kansas,
Eagles, ELP, ELO, Enigma, Dire Straits, Tom Petty, Heart, The Beatles,
Lynyrd Skynyrd, ...
I also love various "world" folk music styles, like Japanese, Peruvian/Bolivian,
Russian, and Irish/Scottish.
I have always had an unusually strong attraction to eagles and dragons, and this fascination has permeated my drawings and stories since childhood. The love of the eagle was probably heightened when I was 8 and saw a Disney movie in the theaters called "The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle", about a Hopi American Indian boy. After 20 years of searching, I recently found a used VHS video copy of this classic, on e-Bay of all places... thank you Roxylee for serendipitously pointing me there!
Dragons have forever been on my mind... If you wish to dabble in some thought-provoking webspace, click the purple spiral fractal below, and read a short illustrated essay on my thoughts regarding the connections between dragons, fractals, god, and the universe. Click on the dragon under it to go directly to a collection of short stories written by myself and a group of friends... a collaborative story-writing experiment.
Well, since my last name is "Swan" in German, it is likely no surprise that I have also liked drawing swans.
My interest in nature, science and outer space has always been strong. The 5-year television series Babylon-5 (story ideas by Harlan Ellison) had myself and my family captivated. The acting was often poor, but the parallels drawn between aliens, the universe, and "god" were very similar to my own thoughts. There is a good unofficial B-5 site, and Dan Wood maintains B-5 information too. Evelio Perez-Albuerne has an amazing assortment of Babylon-5 spaceship models as images and as DXF and other 3-D formats.
One of my favorite haunting melodies, the Ukrainian New Year's song "Carol of the Bells", arranged by George Winston. The original
MIDI file
is courtesy of Eric D. Belsley of MacResource.
Here is his note on it:
Wednesday, December 10, 1997: There have been many questions about the midi file that provides
the music for the MRP Holiday Card (linked from the Mac Resource Page banner); a quick FAQ:
The origin of the file. Some time ago, my sister Karen found a midi file that at best
approximated George Winston's rendition of the Carol of the Bells; she imported the file
into a music notation program (such as Opus) to create a score, which she edited by ear
(by far the hardest part ofthe process). I exported the score back to midi, and then edited
the midi file directly (changing instrumentation, tempi, dynamics, etc.) using Tontata's
excellent shareware midi sequencer, MidiGraphy.
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