Born December 12, 1935 into moneyed, middle class Denmark. Headed for medicine in public and private schools. Escaped to Canada in 1951 and never went back to any formal school. Went from photographer to photojournalist to technical/science writer and editor in that first decade. Science writing is interpretation. Everything is based on logic and you only have to learn the language of a discipline to make it digestible to the informed lay mind. Even technical business writing can be great fun! Guards with shotguns would sometimes (unsuccessfully) try to stop us from getting a story. In that period I covered the 20 engineering disciplines in construction. Later, mining, forestry, pulp and paper, fishing. naval architecture, medicine, finance, earth sciences, etc. Protectionism chased our well-paying US publishers out of Canada in the early sixties so I wrestled with Central Canadian rag merchants until the mid-seventies when I started my own company. I had covered oilpatch exploration for three years so I became a head hunter for geologists, geophysicists, drilling and reservoir engineers. These were great years. Decades of evaluating my sources for scientific and technical reporting, made me a natural for reading potential of earth scientists for oil exploration and exploitation. Some of my friends as well as most of the scientists I fielded were getting into computers in a big way. In the industry we used Univacs and Sigma-8s while the minis, notably Wang and Dec, made the first inroads. The hobby machines, which had started out with the Heathkit analog tube monsters, settled in with the Ataris and the C-64. Aside from covering the main frames and the minis, I totally missed the personal computer revolution, being far too busy being a success; building a 1,500-bottle wine cellar, and fathering two beautiful daughters. Their mother, 18 years my junior, was designed by a sex maniac. I became a videographer for my girls but even though I was the ex-professional, their artist mother was easily the better camera person. Will other parents learn what a great tool a video camera can be for teaching kids not to throw tantrums? The oilpatch crash of 1986 wiped me out. "I was too good at what I was doing to fail", so I hung in too long with too much overhead, sure I'd ride it out. Thankfully, I'd sold half of my West Van house to my dad in the late sixties to preserve it from adventurous law suits. Now, it was the one thing untouched by the wipe-out. The girls' mother had nil skills for coping with failure so she opted out and went home to her parents. I was never denied full and free access, so I didn't really lose my daughters. I spent one terrible year selling mobile homes to generate cash. Even God hates mobile homes. He blows them away at every given opportunity! But the first month I made $7k in 1987, I went and blew half on an Amiga A500 with an A1080, A501, A1010 and a dot matrix printer. It came bundled with WordPerfect, Superbase, MaxiPlan, PageSetter, Deluxe Video, Diga! and CLImate. I wanted Amiga to help edit and title all my family video tapes. It was my first computer and it surprised me by becoming one of my best friends over the following five years. Diga! an early telecommunications program was rated the least of my software but with its basic documentation (however flawed) it was ideal for a stumbling beginner setting up his first modem in solitude (Packard Bell 2400+). I since graduated to the registered JRComm and Terminus. I was far too busy playing with my new machine, trying to make it do what I wanted it to, to hustle homes on wheels, so it was no surprise coming back from a holiday to find another eager beaver manning my desk. At this point oilpatch clients called me back for day labor work. I wrote my first report for pay on my Amiga before WordPerfect's arrival (which was nearly three months after date of purchase) using Ed on WBv1.2 and I thought it was great. The obscure Memacs name and drab documentation failed to make the much more suitable line editor obvious to this neophyte. During the six years following the oil price crash, Calgary exploration personnel shrank from 120,000 to less than 60,000. Every second man eventually bit the dust! Even during periods of such massive layoffs, the odd scientific specialist has to be hired. A company would run an ad, and get literally hundreds of applications. They'd call me in to high grade submissions, furnishing a written report with a short list, based on interviews and evaluations via other industry contacts. At even a modest $500/day, it didn't take much work to effect survival and contributions to the girls. Still, this existence had elements of the bachelor's love life - either feast or famine. I had filled a garage with my leather bound books; my 3,000 LPs and other music and photography paraphernalia. I lived out of my old Chrysler and cheap motels. I'd driven that dinosaur out of the showroom in 1976 and it had been too old to be desired as pickings from my '86 crash. I became expert at hooking up the modem to wires fished from motel walls. I had my girls visiting every weekend and I had them full-time during the two-month school holidays. When the oilpatch continued to find still lower gears to function, I'd make the odd rent with Ami and DTP and at other times starvation free-lance fees from various publishers. Even then there were times when it seemed impossible to generate any kind of cash flow. When I could no longer meet the hotel rent, I'd continue trying to beat economic bushes until I was down to the last $100 which it cost in gas and road fees to get to Vancouver. I'd pack all my stuff into the dinosaur and cross the gorgeous Rockies to my coastal sanctuary. The odd journalistic job would come my way but most considered me a fossil. Hell, even people I'd trained have retired :-). Longest coastal hiatus was three months. Sooner or later, the phone would ring from Calgary. Such calls were then followed with a couple of grand worth of retainer, so I could gas up and roll back over the Rockies to a cheap motel by the Bow River, affording marvelous mind-clearing walks. My daughters became adept with Ami. I still marvel at the recollection of a four-year-old Amber booting up the old pdl Deluxe Draw, asking for four bit planes and lo-res. She couldn't read but if that was what it took to get to her favorite program, that was what she'd do! My ex had gotten into another relationship a couple of years after our breakup. That one blew up in her face within the year but the result was an adorable third girl, Tanya. My two girls loved their new sister who soon called me "daddy" because the other two did. Their mother had moved back to her family but her father had passed away. That household was permanently short of cash so a couple of years back, I rented the smallest room in the basement for my friend, Amiga, so I could spend more time with my little girls. They needed the cash flow more than the motel. While not ideal, this is a workable situation if I take pains to stay out of the War Department's way. My humor now seems to send her up the wall :-) but the girls are happy. Sometimes they like Ami more than I. They have free access to the machine provided sticky fingers are clean, and no liquids are about. 1992 was the first year of survival without a question mark. The remaining oilpatch vice-presidents tend to be people I recruited and guided from their third year of professional life. There HAVE to be some benefits from advancing years. That was also the year that my dad passed away after a relatively brief bout with cancer. We'll all get cancer if we live long enough. Mother now pays the price for a happy marriage. Her best friend of the last 60 years suddenly is no more. Now I have to visit my West Van base for reasons other than my own needs. This year, 1993, ought to be still better than '92 so I'll reward myself with an AGA machine sometime in its latter half. I can't pass this A500 to the girls because they'd have endless fights over it. Maybe I'll leave it in Vancouver since my 79-year-old mother has got herself addicted to the MegaBall Arkanoid clone :-). The girls are now 10 and 12 and need me less (but 3½-year-old Tanya will be very difficult to leave) maybe I'd instead accelerate the old 500 and get out from the matriarchy; get my life out of the garage. I haven't heard my own music in seven years. (Actually, three generations of PMS is beyond even my coping limits :-) --Erik