Fred Van Driel's Home page

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You are visitor number since 8 April 2000. Of course, I visit dozens of times a day to make sure it looks popular.

          My Web page. Okay, so it ain't as fancy as some, with no frames, Java, and all that stuff that takes forever to download and hides the fact that there is no content. This page downloads quickly so you don't have to wait to find out there is no content! I know this photo doesn't show what I look like, which is the point. For those who are interested, the photo was taken in the badlands near Drumheller, Alberta, in September. The area is so wild and dry that the south-facing slopes are barren, while the north-facing slopes, that are protected from the sun, have prickly-pear cactus.
          So, what can I say about myself? Well, I'm a white male, but I'm not dead, so you won't hear about me in your English Lit class. Nor am I responsible for the rise and fall of Western civilization, although I suspect that my cats may have had a paw in it.

My life story

A quick overview

          Raised by wolves in the suburbs of Montréal, Québec, Canada, I was a lousy student, but still talked my way into Queen's University in beautiful Kingston, Ontario. I did manage to get a BA in cartography, but spent most of my time shooting everything on campus as photographer for the Tricolour (the yearbook), and as photo editor for the Queen's Journal.
          After graduating, I spent several years in Montréal as a technician in a professional photographic lab (see my claims to fame) before landing a job as news photographer for Oshawa This Week, and later the Toronto Star. After a couple of years of that, I returned to Montréal and got involved in other aspects of publishing, an on-going interest. Alongside this, I worked at McGill University doing a variety of things related to computers and libraries. At some point I ended up starting a Masters degree (MLIS) programme at McGill.

The year that sanity forgot

          In February of 1996 my world was turned upside down when my wife Lesley found out that her part-time temp job in the library at CP Rail was transmogrifying into a full-time, permanent job with the corporate communications department of the new, restructured Canadian Pacific Railway -- in Calgary!
          In a whirlwind, we flew to Calgary, bought a house, came back to Montréal, found me an apartment, bought a second computer, tested email programmes, watched the house get packed and sold out from under us, and said our goodbyes on Labour Day 1996. While Lesley headed west to a new house and new job, I headed for Westmount and a 2-room apartment to try to complete my degree and pretending I was still working.
          Finally, in May of 1997, I quit my job, and with the degree almost finished, I boarded a train and headed "home," arriving close on the heels of a major snowstorm.

          Now I'm in Calgary, the degree is finished, I'm more or less unemployed, and most of the people I know are CPR employees who are also from Montréal. I need a life ...

Update to March of 1999. I've gotten to know people outside of the CPR, most of them involved in amateur radio. And I'm definitely unemployed now.

-- 30 --

A rant about HTML

          Before you get to the table of contents, you have to listen to a rant about HTML.
          Being used to having the complete control one has doing one's own typesetting, I find HTML really annoying. I have little or no control over typefaces and fonts, leading, margins, line lengths and line breaks. I have to mess with the coding (using <BR> and non-breaking spaces) to indent paragraphs and prevent blank lines between them. I also miss having typeset quotation marks, ligatures, en- and em-dashes, en- and em-spaces, small caps, and other such refinements. For that reason, I don't really specify colours or other such stuff, 'cause the Luddites use the defaults, which are at best tolerable, and the Yahoos (in the Swiftian sense) choose such hideous colour schemes that my specifications wouldn't matter anyway. I find most backgrounds, colours or images, do nothing but make the text hard to read. It is not for nothing that, for over 1000 years, books and manuscripts have been printed with black ink on white paper. So on my pages you get text and photos, and that's it. I'm not trying to demonstrate any great knowledge of HTML and Java, I'm trying to tell you about myself and show you some photos, with pages that will load before the end of the century.
          I'm creating this on a Macintosh IIsi. With this machine's speed, and Netscape 2.02's inability to run Java, it would be silly to try the fancy stuff. Just using PageMill is an exercise in patience, but that is probably good for my wrists.

          Because I, just like you, am used to seeing printed pages, I have remained pretty close to the book form. So you are getting a table of contents, and most pages aren't linked to each other. I've even numbered the pages! Any page that has links to external sites also gets the address in the text so that if you print the page, you will still have the address. Let me know what you think. I appreciate feedback (just don' na go givin' me no guff, 'kay?).

To see a larger 4"x6" image of most photos, just click on the photo you want to see. Suggestion: instead of clicking, open a new window with the large image, then close the new window when you are finished looking. Then it won't have to reload the previous page. With a Macintosh, press mouse-down and pause, then pick "New window..." from the pop-up menu. On a Windows machine, right-click and pick "New window...".           This also works for entire pages, especially this one. When you are finished viewing, instead of clicking "back," close the new window.           A technical note for those of you who care. The small photos are all interlaced GIF files, while the large ones are JPEGs for better colour. If you can set your video for 24 bits or better (millions of colours), you will get the best look at the photos. My video can only do 8 bits (256 colours), but most of the photos look okay.

Thank yous

          Don't worry, I'll be much quicker than most Oscar winners. I have only two thank yous. First to the CPR, for allowing me to use their scanner to scan the photos. And to my friend and former classmate Katherine Barnes, for allowing me to put my page up in her space. My ISP (www.cadvision.com) only gave me 1 megabyte of free space for web pages when I first created these pages. With all these photos I have up, that just didn't cut it. Katherine's ISP (www.globalserve.net) provides 10 MB, so she's given my page a home. Thanks Katherine!
          (Neither ISP deserves a plug. They've both done things that wouldn't be tolerated in any other business.)

Table of Contents	Page	Revision dates
Introduction & life story (what you just read!)	1.0
Boris & Natasha	2.0
Lots of photos of Boris & Natasha	2.1
same photos, but big	2.2
Other cat stuff	2.3
A 3500 km train trip	3.0	(about 50 KB)
same photos, but big	3.1	(about 200 KB)
My claims to fame	4.0
My publishing interests & activities	5.0	minor revision 99/05/20
Radio	6.0	minor revision 99/05/20
Aviation	7.0	minor revision 99/03/29
Links to other sites	8.0	minor revision 99/03/29
Funny anecdotes and stories that came from the 'Net	9.0	revised 98/01/05
Photo Album #1 -- Fish Creek Park	10.1	minor revision 98/08/24, about 200 KB
Photo Album #2 -- Alberta	10.2	minor revision 98/08/24, about 100 KB
Photo Album #3 -- Miscellaneous	10.3	revised 97/12/19, about 50 KB

 Contents
Battler/Van Driel home page

© 1997-2000 Fred Van Driel. Photos © 1997 Lesley Battler and Fred Van Driel.
I welcome any comments, especially if you have trouble viewing the photos. Contact me at vandriel@telus.net.

This site's primary address: http://www3.telus.net/vandriel/fred/index.html
Fred's site:
Last minor change: 00/04/08
Last major change: 99/03/29
Site moved but not revised 02/07/28

this page:
Last minor change: 00/04/08
Last major change: 97/12/28