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Paul

Robin

Paul is an Electrical Engineer, currently working on

Robin is an Accountant, currently working with

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.)

Exciting as that sounds, we knew each other from our college days at OSU, where we were good friends. We were out of contact for years, and another friend told Robin about Four11 (now Yahoo People), the people search engine. Robin thought, "Who do I know that would have e-mail, that I haven't talked with lately, that I would actually want to talk with." That's the "found him on the internet" part. A few emails back and fourth... we were both at the end of relationships with others. We met a few times, and one evening we met up with some of Robin's friends and workmates, had a few drinks, rented a movie on the way back, and ended up at her place to watch it. That's the "invited him to her home" part. Robin had a case of Full Sail beer, which she had won at a contest. We both drank a few bottles. That's the "he plied her with liquor" part. Robin discovered that Paul is very ticklish, which she found very amusing, since she is also (not nearly as much) and her previous boyfriends were not ticklish as all. Much tickling occured, which ultimately turned into wrestling on the floor. By the end of the movie, it was late, we were tired, and Paul certainly wasn't driving home. We woke up together the next morning.

There's more... the next morning Robin called her friend, who is considerably more experienced, to get advise. She very quietly got out of bed and closed the bedroom door. Luckily her personal advisor lives on the east coast and was wide awake to hear all the sordid details. The conversation went something like this....

Robin: Help! There is a guy in my bed!
Judy: What did you do? Are you doing the walk of shame this morning?
Robin: The walk of shame? Oh no! We had too much to drink to do anything. I woke up with my clothes on. What should I do?
Judy: Do you have coyote arm?
Robin: What's that?
Judy: You know...when you wake up with someone and you would rather chew your arm off than wake him up.
Robin: Well...he is not that bad. Now help me! He is going to wake up soon. What am I supposed to do?
Judy: OK, now listen to me. DO NOT let him linger around. DO NOT chat with him. DO NOT have breakfast with him. Get him out of your apartment as soon as you can.
Robin: Uhhh....no linger....no chat....no breakfast. Got it. My head is pounding. Not as young as I used to be.
Judy: Good God.....how much did you drink?
Robin: Enough to wake up next to someone I intended to send home.
Judy: Yup, that will do it. Call me when you get him out of your place.

Robin then picked up her tax accounting text book (to look like she was doing something when Paul finally rolled out of bed.) and waited for Paul to emerge from her bedroom. Remebering Judy's valuable advise (No Lingering, No Chatting No Breakfast,) she got ready to boot him out of her apartment as soon as he got up. When Paul finally did get up, they lingered around the apartment and chatted for a while. (Doh! There went rules one and two) Then when Paul suggested that they go out for breakfast, Robin willingly agreed. (Doh! Rule number three....broken).

In the days that followed, Robin had consulted friends on what to do about the situation. Paul, just as her last 2 boyfriends (one for 5 years and the other for 3 years) lived in the same dorm as she did during her freshman year at Oregon State. After boyfriend number 2, who was also an electrical engineer, Robin had decided that the McNary Hall dating pool was closed. So the best course of action was to have a talk with Paul and tell him that she liked him a lot, but really only wanted to be friends with him. Well, Robin never got around to having that talk with Paul. Now they are living together, running a business together, (now the mushy part) and still crazy about each other.

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.

TODO: new tech projects: High power audio amp, animated X-mas lights. These are already designed and working, but will require some changes to be really useful for others, and of course there's the matter of actually writing good web pages about them.

TODO: linux single board computer

TODO: what is Robin planning? Pass the CPA exam...keep track of all the R&D expenses for PJRC.COM...Get Paul to make her PC dual boot with Linux and Windows... (ok, installed linux, but there's not much I can do about the CPA exam, except maybe be less distracting :) Update, November 2001: Robin is offically a CPA.