Robert Wells Home Page
Things I'm interested in:
- Brief status update, again - We moved to Silicon Valley and I joined
the startup Camitro Corporation. We sold it to ArQule, Inc. in early
2001 and I stuck with it. The California office was closed down in a
restructuring in December 2002, and I've been working to secure financing to
spin out the ex-Camitro assets for six months, in a terrible investment
climate. We've found a lead investor and a Japanese investment group
wanting to invest, but need to find a 2nd US investor. Its getting to
feel like a long time to wait... -rwells, 2003.06.15.
- [Interested in...] Updating this list, eventually. I wrote it all in a stream of consciousness
session one night in 1997, and my interests have changed in various ways since then... but
I haven't had time to get back to reworking it yet... -rwells, 1999.04.28.
- Computer Software Development
- C++ Data presentation and analysis applications
- Object Oriented Design
- Component software architecture, particularly OLE and Java
- PERL scripts
- Web site development
- Internationalization, particularly Japanization of software
- My resume of development projects
- Reading
- Mysteries, particularly by Dick Francis, Rex Stout, and Ellis Peters.
- Science Fiction, particularly by David Brin, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Alexis
Gilliland, Robert Heinlein, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson.
- Music and Reading Aloud
- Singing baritone in the Nativity of the Theotokos church choir in Chelsea, MA.
- Tonsured reader in Orthodox Church of America, reading epistles, psalms, old testament
readings, etc. during services.
- Reading aloud to Tommy before bed: the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, the Indian in the
Cupboard books by Lynn Reid Banks, Tolkien, Mark Twain, etc.
- Listening to Celtic folk-rock bands, such as Steeleye Span, Battlefield Band, or Fairport Convention.
- Space Tourism, Space Development, Space Colonization
- Recreation
- Low impact aerobic step and fitness classes
- Ping-Pong (aka Table tennis) - Chris and I play on the table upstairs most nights, lots
of fun
- Swimming at the Waltham YMCA
- Fair weather bicycling
- Warm water scuba diving: the Great Barrier Reef off Cairns in Australia, and South Water
Caye in Belize, so far.
- Travel
- Camping trips, sometimes in rented RV's, sometimes with tents; we have done three
camping trips in France.
- Road trips, driving across parts of the US or Europe.
- Scuba diving and beach bumming trips, to Belize and Florida
- Trips to Beaumont, Texas to visit my father and Aunt 'Vetta, trips to Charlottesville,
Virginia to visit my brother's family, trips to Los Angeles, CA to visit my sister's
family, and my uncle Buddy's family. Maybe we'll make it to Milwaukee sometime soon to
visit my cousin Janet and her family!
- Business trips to San Francisco, many US cities, London, Tokyo, and Sydney.
- Learning Japanese Language
- Ann and I have been taking evening Japanese language classes at the Showa Women's
Institute Boston campus since September 1994. It is very hard, and we sometimes backslide
and don't study like we should, but we keep at it and are gradually getting better. I
think we are still in the first grade, equivalent.
- Japanese information processing - after considerable experimenting I've figured out a
nice way to put Kanji text such as into Web pages so
that everyone who looks at the page graphically will see the Japanese characters properly.
I explain how you too can do this in my guide to
displaying Japanese text in Web pages worldwide.
- Video editing
- I'm pretty heavily invested in Hi8 video equipment, with a Sony TR101 camcorder, and a
Sony EVS7000 Hi8 editing VCR with RC timecode. I use the VideoToolkit software (originally
by Abbate Software, since bought by Videonics) on our Mac 660AV to build edit lists, which
I assemble to a Sony SLV920HF VHS editing VCR.
- I use a Snappy gadget on my PC parallel port to capture the JPEG stills you see in our
web pages.
- I have shot dozens of hours of family history interviews with older members of my
extended family, and eventually I really will get around to finishing more of the the edit
lists, making the copies, and sending them out to all the cousins, uncles, aunts, etc.
I'll building up considerable guilt over procrastinating so much on these... it would help
if I wasn't such a perfectionist.