Welcome to my E- book and adventues page.
For a 17 month period starting in March 1991, I was employed as a data center operations supervisor for an American oil and gas seismic data service company. The company I worked for had a contract to provide consulting work with the Chinese Geophysical Research Institute (GRI), which was a research arm of the Geophysical Exploration Bureau. The bureau in turn, was part of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).
At the time this took place, I was 25 years old and it was the experience of a lifetime. Since it conceivably could have been a once in a lifetime experience, I took hundreds of photos along the way to document what was going on while I was living through the experience. I long dreamed of writing a book about my experiences abroad and sharing them with the world. Some people who go through such experiences feel this way, while many others do not. I often felt that if I could have made a movie about what it was like, I would have imagined that it would have been like an early 1990's version of the film (and television series) M.A.S.H. I felt like I had lived 10 years packed into that stretch of less than a year and a half. However, since I don't work for the New York Times like Sheryl WuDunn and Nick Kristof, nor do I work as a travel writer like this guy does, I really think that I didn't have much of a chance to realize such an endeavor until the Internet came along.
Read the Prologue to my experiences in China here.
Many of the photos and photo stories are about my fellow expatriates and friends whom I met in Asia. This page has a "Who's Who" list of the Cast Of Characters who took part in this tale.
At the bottom of this list are some catagories of photos taken since this tale ended.
This website was founded in October 2002. During the late 1990's, I had gone back to school to finish an undergraduate college education and did not have much time to devote to developing a website. When I finally started to conceive of this website, I decided that a major part of my site would be devoted to writing an E - Book of my experiences in Asia.
My efforts at this endeavor have proven to be a mixed bag. There have been mechanical and technical difficulties, such as the fact that several scanners broke down while I was scanning photos into my computer. I have fried several USB ports which also slowed the process of putting together the site. Over Christmas 2002, my web hosting service was hit with a hacking attack and lost all of its customers website files. Fortunately, I found some software that quickly allowed me to repost almost all of my files quickly and easily.
By far the biggest problem I have faced was that it was my plan and intention to scan my photos in chronological time order such that the site visitor could feel what it was like for me to go through this experience as I was living through it. In other words, I wanted to recreate the experience in time order such that you could "walk in my shoes" if you cared to.
The problem with this was that I had a hundreds of photos to scan and organize and I ended up scanning and organizing them in a haphazard manner. This happened because the photos themselves were mismatched often years of being shown to others. Many of my photos are grouped together as I intended, but others are not. The final outcome of this endeavor will be that the visitor will more or less be able to follow me around as I intended, but not exactly.
I have included information underneath each photo which describes how large the photograph is in kilobytes so that the viewer can determine whether they want to view the photograph or not. I found this to be particularly important because when I was first scanning in photographs I made the mistake of scanning in photos that were often over 100 kilobytes in size. I knew from experience that many people don't want to wait for such photos to download because it is a waste of thei time. As time went on, I started scanning in photos so that less data had to be downloaded. In the future, I may rescan some of my photos to get rid of the "big data problem".
None of my photos are doctored or altered in any way except for one important matter. Much to my anger and annoyance, when I started scanning my photographs I had discovered that many of my photos had a thin pen like mark that was visible in the photos (look at the bottom right hand side of this photo to see what I am talking about). I have no idea where these marks came from or how they got into the disfigured photographs. I spent a lot of time trying to scan photos such that these blemishes were not visible to viewers. It deeply pains me to see them and they make the photos an absolute eyesore because these pen marks draw attention away from the rest of the photograph. Otherwise, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG).
I will easily admit that many of my photos are less than brilliant, but that was (and is) because I do not pursue photography as a big hobby. Most of my non - Asia adventure photos which came later were taken later with APS photos and film.
I have also constructed my photo pages in such a way that the site visitor can read a photo story which I have written to accompany each photograph. The link which is below each photo thumbnail not only has information on the size of the photo, but it also has a link to the photo story I have written to accompany the photograph. In most cases, the photo story that I have written does correspond to something that is happening in the photograph or something that the photograph reminds me of.
However, there are other photo stories where the story has little or nothing to do with the photo it is attached to. Why did I do this? Because frequently while I was in Asia, there were situations where some event occured which I really wanted to tell a story about, but I didn't happen to have a camera on me to take a picture to capture the moment. Therefore, I will sometimes use a rather boring photo which doesn't have a lot going on in it to tell a story which I really wanted to share. Ergo, you will not see any pictures of naked go - go dancers on this website :( , but you may want to at least read the photo story below some of those photos of dirt running tracks or smoke filled Chinese urban landscapes.
I have made use of several invaluable tools to help me with my story writing. The first was my own memory, but the problem I now face is that more than 10 years have passed since I went through this experience. However, about a year after I returned home to America, I wrote down a list of about 175 unusual or strange things that happened while I was in Asia on a yellow tab while the idea of writing a regular paperback book was still on my mind. All these years later, I kept that yellow tab and as I have been writing my stories I have consulted that list and include those stories in my photo stories. Also, for the past 20 years, I have a running and jogging diary and I kept one while I was in Asia. I often write down interesting or noteworthy events of the day in my running diary and this has helped immensely in pinpointing dates that certain things happened. Also, the Internet itself has been invaluable in searching for things that occured or happened at certain points in time. I still have some travel books which I purchased while over in Asia from that time frame which have also helped jar my memory with such things as how much things used to cost or what were the names of obscure places I visited, but had forgotten about.
One issue that vexes me very much is the matter of telling stories about the mainland Chinese. I have changed or withheld names of many Chinese because I am worried about potential reprocussions that may happen to them even though none of the Chinese I worked with did ever did anything worth suffing any official retribution for. The people of China already put up with enough bullshit for living under the regime they live under. Ergo, I don't want to be responsible for anybody getting into trouble simply for having worked with (or having met) a Westerner in their past. You might think that I shouldn't have to worry about such things after all these years, but if you have read anything written about China by anyone who has some knowledge about the country over the past 30 years or so, then you might understand why I still worry about such things.
Likewise, the last names of Westerners and co - workers have been withheld to safeguard their privacy.
As with most such websites, all photos and text from this E - Book is copyrighted (c) from October 2002 - 2003 by The Mighty Wizard. Any requests for permission to use text and photos can be sent to me. I have no intention of making any money from this endeavor.
Regards and do enjoy you visit.
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