An octogenarian and a philologist, I was born into a U.S. Navy family. I was exposed to the Chinese language as a 3-year old Navy dependent in China. At WWII’s end my family moved to Hawaii; growing up there I learned some common Hawaiian, Hawaiian pidgeon-English, Japanese, and Chinese words and phrases.

In high school I became interested in shortwave radio. I was trained by the U.S. Marine Corps in aircraft communications and radar equipment. After my service in the Marine Corps I was an engineering tech in the transistor era, then the era of semiconductors, and then into microprocessors and microprocessor applications. I wrote corporate technical manuals to explain how to use various types of electronic equipment, wrote service manuals to help electronics technicians to repair analog and digital components and equipment used in communications, home entertainment, amateur radio, and the early-era home/personal computers.

My interest in amateur radio and using Morse code eventually led me to learn how to use a typewriter to 'copy' hand-sent Morse. With that knowledge I earned an FCC 2nd Class commercial radio operator license, which qualified me to be employed as a marine radio operator aboard merchant ships. It was that 'sea change' in my life which began what was to be the most adventurous and often dangerous period of my life.

With that FCC 2nd Class Radiotelegraph Operator license in my hand I was employed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as the sole radio operator on the Institution's oceanographic research ships. After a four-month training period sending and receiving oceanographic-related messages in Morse code at the Institution's radio station I was assigned to one of the oceanographic research ships operating out in the Western Pacific.

I left Scripps when I earned enough sea time to obtain my FCC 1st Class Radiotelegraph operator license, and was then able to ship out on commercial tankers and cargo ships. During that period of my life I was shipwrecked on a reef in the Philippine Sea, actually fought Columbian river pirates, endured humongous typhoons and hurricanes in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and went swimming in the top three feet in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean. I have circumnavigated the globe twice, crossed the Equator and the International Date Line many times, went above the Artic Circle and was only a few miles away from the Antarctic Circle, and experienced many other adventures in many nations and with many people -- and learned their languages as well.

Upon retirement from working as a maritime radio operator I capitalized on my depth of knowledge of the inner workings of computers and computer programming (manually, as well as by using computer programming languages to write applications programs), and to write HTML and advanced coding to create, operate, and maintain websites on individual computers and servers.