A Little Information About Me

I live in Fort Worth , Texas , my present location since 1984. Over the years, I also lived in Dallas , Denver , Seattle , Billings , St. Louis , Detroit , New York City, and Córdoba , Mexico . I have been in the same house since 1984. If you had told me, before 1984, that I would be in the same city or same house this long, I would have laughed at you. The railroad transferred me about every four years until 1984. It just stresses that nothing ever stays the same, and I've enjoyed being in the same spot this long!

I have written web pages for small companies, as well as personal pages for friends, and I currently keep several Internet sites for nonprofit groups and social organizations. I feel one of the hardest pages a person can write is their own! And, yet, it should be one of the easiest as we are writing about a person we know well! Adding animations, pictures and graphics is the easy part. It is the text for a web page, the say-it-in-writing part, which is often difficult. I can write about others, but I usually find it difficult to write about myself.

Like many others, I have a multitude of hobbies and projects to keep me occupied. That also means I have many projects that are still not finished!

I'm retired now, but for most of my career, I worked in the railroad industry. My work involved computers and computer applications, setting up hardware, teaching applications and doing a little programming. I also did technical writing, producing “how to” manuals and instructions for new computer applications. I wrote policies and procedures when there were changes that affected our part of the company. During the last two or three years I was with the railroad, my primary focus was working with applications programmers to make certain our programs met our business needs. I often wondered if we would ever get an application up and running before the business needs changed again! With the arrival of e-commerce, as well as more and more tasks handled on the Internet, I found the needs changed at a fast pace! A secondary focus involved frequent trips to México to discuss computer related NAFTA issues with potential intermodal transport partners.

Some Of My Favorite Pastimes...

• Obviously, “surfing the net” which is one of the main reasons I have a home page! There is so much to see and do; the possibilities are endless.
• County & Western dancing! Two-stepping, country waltz, they are all great!
• Model railroading, although I do not have the room to have mine set up at the moment. Maybe I should "convert" the green house!
• Camping and boating. Unfortunately there never seems to be enough time to do as much of it as I'd like. There is a picture of me boating in the pictures section.
• Genealogy, the study of family ancestries and histories. For each success in finding another earlier generation, there are multiple failures and dead ends. If you have any information about any of the families I am researching, please let me know. I have also been in contact with many "cousins" and have created a surname page for anyone who is researching the name Whittaker or one of the other spellings. I have also created a separate pictures page of ancestral photographs which will eventually be linked to other genealogy pages. Many of these photographs go back several generations and are interesting to see.