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Welcome to my website.

The website is relatively new, but I’ve been hanging around the web for a long time. The Wayback Machine crawled my first website in 1997, the year after it started its archiving. I was teaching computer science in those days and I had followed closely the development of the internet and the the process that led to hypertext and the World Wide Web.  Before the web, some may remember, computer-savvy folks shared their data on something called gopher and held email discussions on usenet user groups. Once the web became popular, we learned how to use hypertext markup language (HTML) to construct web pages. We viewed the pages, I remember, with the Mosaic browser. This was soon replaced by the early Netscape browser and its famous shooting star logo.

How the online world has changed! New tools, new services, and new echelons of users.

Over the last 20 years I’ve used the internet for a lot of projects. Pieces of me are all over the web. Links to some of those pieces are collected on these pages.  I became a writer about the time I started fiddling with networks and the web, so most of the bits of me on the web have to do with writing. This site is, above all, a display case for the books I have written.

The most recent book to be published was Mushrooms of British Columbia. You can read about its background on this site or go to the book’s own website. The reception of this field guide has been amazing–for the first year after its publication in September 2021, it was the #1 bestseller in BC. We are preparing a fourth printing.

In the fall of 2024, I will have a new book out. It is called Nazorean: How a Jewish Wisdom Sect Gave Birth to the Church.

The scenic pictures on this pages of this site, by the way, are ones that I’ve taken during my rambles around southern BC. This page features our local creek at the height of the spring runoff. You are welcome to use the pictures on these pages in any way you want, web or print. Picture credits always appreciated, of course.