Macs Only
Acoustic Legacy Studios
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Macs Only
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Acoustic Legacy Studios
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I live in Cambria, California. Cambria is halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, right on the Pacific Ocean. As a matter of fact, my house is less than 100 yards from the water. If you're planning a visit to Cambria, my Cambria info pages may be of some help. You can also see the current weather from the weather station atop my home office. Another very useful Cambria page is here.
If you're not sure how to pronounce my name, it's "Rick." No, seriously, my last name is pronounced "a-RICK-ee-oh," sounding similar to Pinocchio.
I'm a software engineer by trade, though nowadays I'm semi-retired. My part-time gig is providing support for Macintosh users (see the Macs Only pages.)
I bought my first Apple II in summer of 1977 (serial number 0183!). At the time, I'd had about five years' experience as a software developer on mainframe computers, and a couple years of spare-time programming on a friend's homebrew microcomputer system. I wrote several magazine articles about programming the II and occasionally reported software bugs to Apple. One thing led to another, and I joined Apple Computer in Jan 1979. More details in the My Time At Apple section.
After nearly twenty years of living in Silicon Valley, I made the move to Cambria in 1998 to enjoy a less crowded lifestyle and community involvement. I continued working for Apple Computer for three more years while in Cambria, telecommuting from home and showing up at the office for a few hours a week. In October 2001 I ended my third stint at Apple Computer, in all about twenty years working at the company.
In late 2002, I started my part-time Macintosh support service, Macs Only. I now support about 240 clients in the Cambria area, with a handful the nearby towns of San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Atascadero, and Morro Bay.
In 2000, I began acting in several staged play-readings at the Pewter Plough Playhouse here in Cambria. In fall of 2000, we went into full production of Driving Miss Daisy for 21 shows. That was the beginning...
Cambria's Allied Arts Association sponsored an acting class in early 2001, led by Actors' Studio graduate, actor Richard Romanus. Richard played many bad-guys in film and on television over the years. The class, originally planned for a month, ran for the better part of the year. Richard retired (mostly) from acting, moved to Greece, where he and his wife Anthea Sylbert are concentrating on writing and some production work.
In the class, I learned that I was pretty clueless about acting in my "Daisy" debut; people enjoyed the performance, but it wasn't till my next play that I really felt I knew what I was doing!
The list:
I spend a little time recording music at Acoustic Legacy Studios, a 16-track recording studio in my home. In the late 90s, I wrote a monthly studio-techniques column for Bass Player magazine, and about a dozen articles articles for Recording Magazine.
As a user of the Panasonic/Ramsa DA7 digital mixing console, I've collected a lot of my discoveries and thoughts about that device on a set of essays pages.
I maintain my web pages on a MacOS X system (currently a 2.16GHz 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo laptop) , using vi as my text editor. Since I'm not going wild with the HTML code, it isn't necessary to use a graphical web-page editor. Pages are uploaded to the web server as they're changed.
In order to more easily build the pages, I use genpage, a large perl script that processes a set of web page sources into finished pages. There are about 700 files in the entire site source, counting images; these reduce to under 100 actual web pages.
Genpage allows me to minimize duplication of the similar sections of the pages (e.g. navigation bars, headers, and footers). Because it allows one to put perl subroutines into the page templates, I have one that automatically sets the "last change date" into each page.