Welcome.
Do you remember that ancient visual joke where someone asks a man “So, do you have any kids?” The man whips out a wallet and six feet of accordion-fold pictures unravel.
Well, that's Robinsend: the web-based, pet-heavy equivalent of that accordion-fold wallet.
There are a few places I've left online tracks and assorted web detritus. Beware of link-rot and abandoned mineshafts.
CairnTalk.net — originally an adjunct to the Cairn Terrier Club of America site, I established the forum as a means to allow the CTCA to interact in a friendly, informal way with Cairn fanciers.
The club declined to embrace the opportunity; however, the community thrived despite benign neglect by the parent organization. CairnTalk lives on today as an unaffiliated independent Cairn community forum.
ClandDestination.net — built initially to play with a new release of some community software, it's currently storing some family photos.
I'd hoped to coax my far-flung family into using an online community suite to store recipes, family stories photos, and the occasional discussion — in short, to serve as a virtual meeting place and online memory — but family members proved resistant. Facebook has captured what share of mind there is for such things.
labroad.us — a placeholder vanity domain seemed a reasonable place to park an instance of a small Omeka proof-of-concept proposal I created for the History committee of the Cairn Terrier Club of America.
I set up a couple of drupal-based portfolio sites on this domain to hightlight some of the work I'd done for the Cairn Terrier Club of America, but the pace of platform-based web exploits exceeded my desire to patch and maintain essentially idle sites so I reverted them to parked sites after the inevitable hacking.
No Toto — an impulse domain and image dump I made to use for hotlinking forum-posted images, redundant backup and other ephemeral purposes. Created mainly as an excuse to play with setting up a virtual host and to see if h5ai would be a reasonable image browser for an image dump. So far it seems to be working nicely. Since node.js is available in this environment I had an opportunity to try ghost — hence the single-serving blog instance you are now viewing.
CRCTC, OTEEC — I'm active in two nonprofit clubs that I helped form: the Columbia River Cairn Terrier Club and the Oregon Trail's End Earthdog Club. I've been president of each, often a board member, and have served as web adminstrator for both since their inception. The OTEEC site is a bare-bones placeholder WordPress instance where we post our event entry forms when they become available for our Spring and Fall tests. CRCTC is a full-service club site running Invision Power Board.
earthdog.net — During lunchtime walks in downtown Portland I kept meeting people with small terriers and dachshunds. Small terriers need work so I tended to talk up earthdog tests to people I met. To save time, be more thorough, and spare innocent dog-walkers from being buttonholed for ten minutes by a crazed terrier enthusiast, I spun up a quick WordPress site with some basic information about earthdog tests. That way I could just hand 'em a card with the URL and tell them "check it out — your dog will love you for it!"
LinkedIn - the department I helped manage at ADP was disassembled to make way for a different development methodology and the management team vaporized in a major restructuring. I loved what I was doing but I'm also excited by the prospect of new work.
I'm made of a cheerful alloy of creative thinking and data-loving process orientation, bonded to a substrate of terrier tenacity. I'm fond of detail and precision but am more tolerant of ambiguity than many. Probably because I have an ability to see the forest and the trees — I can work happily with minutiae while not losing track of the big picture. My work history* and contact information is available on LinkedIn.
*I did leave off long-long-ago jobs at Columbia Helicopters and three (count 'em, three) libraries.
A placeholder post for tips and reminders while tinkering with a ghost instance on a Digital Ocean droplet.
Digital Ocean has a helpful library of tutorials covering a vast array of available platforms, frameworks, operating systems, and application stacks that are deployable on their SSD cloud servers. I was able to create a "droplet", install a LEMP stack, configure several virtual hosts/subdomains, and add a ghost instance with surprisingly few dead-ends or missteps.