Erehwon Notebook is my personal online journal and weblog. I began the Notebook in mid-1999 as a follow-on to a series of personal web sites that have lived at this URL for the past several years. Originally, the Notebook was nothing but some static HTML that I updated manually (and irregularly). Eventually, I discovered that other people were doing similar things, and I stumbled across a tool called Blogger that allowed me to update the posts to the site more easily and frequently.
Blogger was a great tool, but after a few months I learned the basics of PHP and managed to finally configure MySQL sucessfully. I rebuilt the site using my own posting engine, which gave me a great deal more control over what I was doing, and let me get away from some of the annoyances of Blogger. The current post archive dates from this site re-design.
You can find posts about all sorts of things in the Notebook, though I tend to post entries about the subjects nearest and dearest to me. This generally includes technical stuff, usually focused on Linux/Open Source, and IT in general, privacy-related rants, scientific articles, art, history and culture. You'll also probably find some things related to my family.
As for myself, I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades that's ended up wandering into the wonderful, wild world of Information Technology. I was originally trained as an Environmental Interpreter (i.e. Naturalist), but having graduated during the Regan administration, finding any envronmentally-related jobs wasn't easy. I ended up working at a school for Lakota (Sioux) kids in South Dakota for a few years, where I met my wonderful wife, Terri. Eventually, we wandered back east to Indiana, Terri's home, where I finished my M.S. and Terri completed her Ph.D. I spent the next several years doing management consulting and training, including a lot of experiential education, much of it in cooperation with Indiana University.
From a very young age, however, I've been involved with computers (I first learned to program on a Commodore PET 2001). With the development of the WWW and Mosaic I finally made the leap from computers being a hobby to them being my vocation, and have been involved with IT in some capacity ever since. I've run my own web development company, and held a variety of Corporate IT positions. These days, I'm Chief Technology Officer for two companies; one dealing with industrial robotics and one being a very interesting e-commerce start-up, which I hope to discuss more in the Notebook as it develops.
In my spare time, I mess around with my home network, read a lot, pursue my various obsessions with things Japanese, early American and Civil War history, and amateur photography. I'm also the father of two wonderful children, Rhiannon and Ian.