About Paul and Robin

Paul

Robin

Paul is an Electrical Engineer, currently working on

Robin is an Accountant, currently working with PPM Energy

Here's us, visiting Mickey Mouse in Disneyland, September '98. We went in the third week of Sept, just after schools are back in session... and also Robin's Birthday. There were virtually no lines, we did nearly everything, twice, in four solid days, and Robin's ready for more already! (When people look at our Disney pictures, they all say..."Robin is having a lot of fun.)

Paul tries windsurfing (June 2005), much to Robin's amusement...
It's not so easy balancing	Well, this part is easy!	A few fleeting moments of success.

Several months passed, and I'd more or less forgotten about Mike's little project, when something amazing and unexpected happened. I got an email from some guy I'd never heard of, who was using my little monitor program! I couldn't believe it, someone was really using it for something. After the initial suprise, it felt good to know that someone somewhere was getting some use out of it. It was a nice satisfying little thing... one of those little pieces of good news that picks up your day. I'd done many dozens of projects over the years, lots of cool gadgets and programs, and it was a nice feeling to know that instead of lying in a junk box or sitting on a shelf, my little monitor program was living on. That first email was a special moment that I will always remember.

I'd been using BBS's, email, chat systems and usenet newsgroups since '87, and I'd exchanged lots of messages with people I'd never met in real life. I'd had many very positive experiences on-line, but this was the first time I'd actually (sort of) published something.

A month or so went by, and I was almost as suprised when I received another email from someone else. Maybe it shouldn't have been such a suprise, but I really didn't expect to ever see another message. Well, a few weeks later a third message showed up, and by the time Summer rolled around, I was getting an email every week!

I said to myself, "I better try out this Mosiac thing and see what this WWW stuff looks like.". After a bit of frustration with Mosiac and I learned that lots of people were switching to Netscape (then version 0.96). The web was a very different place back then. Today it seems that a lot of people don't know the Internet as much more than a great big shopping mall. That's really unfortunate.

Anyways, the page Mike made was really the [not so good] text I had written years ago, converted to HTML. If other people were really going to be reading this stuff, I needed to make it better, better explain how (any why) things work, and maybe make it look nicer.

From late in the Summer through September 1995, I created my own web site, to replace Mike's original HTML conversion of my original crappy text file docs. I added Ken Stauffer's free assembler, a circuit board I'd made a couple years back that could run the code, and a small library of other useful bit of code I'd written. I wanted the site to be useful, since it was obvious that people would be using it.

Though 1996 to 1999, I made minor additions here and there. It takes quite a bit of time to write good and useful web pages, and I've always wanted to do more pages than I can reasonably find the time to write.

April 1999, I was notified by OSU that they would not be able to host my web site much longer. It's amazing they had hosted it that long, since I graduated in 1992 and hadn't done any graduate work since '95. I needed to move the web site to proper hosting with its own domain name. paul.com was taken, so PJRC seemed like as reasonable a choice as any, and Robin likes it ;)

It is my hope that PJRC.COM will continue to provide useful resources for people working on projects, that every now and then, someone who visits will find something that's really useful.