I am a Canadian citizen residing permanently in the US. I moved, in 1997, to St. Paul Minnesota, which I consider the "other great white north" :-) I say this because St. Paul is north of Southwestern Ontario, where I was originally located. I was born and bred in London, Ontario. I moved to St. Paul as a job transfer for the company I work for -- "The Mining" as 3M is affectionately called by natives in the St. Paul area.

Software engineer, application development specialist, trainer/mentor, and web designer/developer are just a few of the roles I do at my daytime job. This is a job that I enjoy very much. I have been with the same company for 25 years as of April 24 2003. Thankfully I have a "real job" so I can pay for all the toys I acquire as I pursue my hobbies, some of which are listed below.

Digital Photography

I purchased my first digital camera, an Olympus Camedia D490 Zoom 2.1 Megapixel, in March 2001. The pictures in the photo gallery for events that occurred in 2001 were taken with the D490, such as my Mediterranean Cruise Sep 2001 and Northern Minnesota Jul 2001 vacations, and the Mount Frontenac golf course.

I purchased my second digital camera, an Olympus Camedia C700 Ultra Zoom 2.1 Megapixel, in March 2002. I like the C700 because it has a much better optical zoom, 10x as opposed to 3x optical on the D490. The C700 has some pre-programmed auto-focus settings or you can completely set everything manually, much like an SLR film camera. The other big benefit is that all the accessories I purchased for the D490, such as memory media cards, re-chargeable batteries, and USB media reader, all work for the C700. See PGA Championship Aug 2002 for an example of pictures taken with the C700 camera.

I use a variety of image viewing and editing software products to manage my digital photos. My favorite products are Adobe Photoshop Elements, Ulead PhotoImpact 7, PhotoThumb, irfanView, and Ulead SmartSaver Pro. I also have the Camedia Master software that came with the Olympus cameras.

I use each of these products for a particular part of the digital photo management process. Camedia Master and irfanView are great for quickly browsing through the digital photo files. I use PhotoImpact Album to create album catalogs of all my digital photos. Photoshop Elements and PhotoImpact are the real workhorses for doing the editing of the digital photos to achieve the desired finished results. PhotoThumb is used to create the thumbnail and larger images for display at this web site. I use SmartSaver to optimize the size of the Web images to help reduce page load time.

Golf

I started golfing in the spring of 2000. I took lessons once a week for 8 weeks (4 weeks indoors and 4 weeks outdoors). I began golfing about 1-2 times a week that summer. I was pretty awful, but felt I had potential to improve.

In June 2000 I met the love of my life, Andy, who is a fanatic for golf -- good thing I am too or we would not see much of each other during the golf season. We have a membership at a local golf course in Wisconsin and are usually there about 3-4 times a week. I slowly improved my golf game that summer (2000) and even more the next year (2001). In July 2001, I finally broke 100 for the first time, with no mulligans, do-overs, or foot wedges (honestly :-). I accomplished this feat at the Falls Golf Course in International Falls, MN, where I had never played before.

In March 2002, I went all out and purchased new clubs (Taylor Made SuperSteel Burner irons and woods and a Taylor Made TPi22 putter), a new bag (Taylor Made of course :-), and new shoes (Nike Course Air Tour). Now my game will have to live up to my equipment - yeesh that will be a tall order.

My goal now is to be able to keep my score consistently under 100. Let's see... keep your head down, keep your shoulders steady, slow your swing down, follow through, don't step out, etc... if I can just remember all that stuff on every shot, I may have a chance :-)

My Personal Web Site

I purchased my own personal domain (pdgproservices.com) in January 2002. My initial purpose for this domain is to build a web site to share my photos with my family and friends. There is no connection between this site and the company I work for in my daytime job.

I have learned a lot more about web designing and development as a secondary goal/benefit of putting up my web site. Maybe some day I can start a new business for myself.... hmmmm, anybody need a web site built for them?