Hi... My name is Rob... and I am an urbanite.

       "Hi Rob!"

I live in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon. Previously, I've lived in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, and so on and so forth. I'm a Pennsylvania boy by birth, but the Pacific Northwest is where I'm proud to call home.

I spent eleven years working in radio in various capacities, so a few of the posts here will reflect that - but I tend to post most of my thoughts on broadcasting on my often neglected radio blog.

Politically, I'm so freaking independent that I'm not even an Independent. I vote with my head and then my heart, political affiliation be damned. Most would call me a liberal, but I simply say I am a man with a conscience who votes accordingly.

Anything else you could want to know about me is covered in my blog somewhere.

I designed and built this site in March, 2004, using Photoshop for the graphics and the long ago abandoned Adobe GoLive software for the more complex parts of the underlying code. The code that runs this site these days was mostly written by hand in a text editor (because I'm geeky like that). The blog itself is powered by Movable Type.

You might have noticed that the layout of this page doesn't match the design of the rest of my blog.

I've redesigned Jalpuna several times. This page is what my site looked like from the fall of '04 through the winter of '05. This was a design I kind of liked and kind of didn't. Or, more honestly, it's a design I got bored with and redid, though I enjoyed it enough to keep it for this info page (brutal honesty: this layout became a giant pain in my ass). If you go to the "Ja-huh?" page, you can see the original design of Jalpuna (the giant pain in my ass design that pre-dated this one). That's also where you'll find out why I named this site Jalpuna.

Along with posting pics here, I started posting my favorite shots on a site I designed specifically for my photography: twenty200. And, like everyone else, I have an account on flickr. You're there too? Great! Drop by and say hi, whydoncha?

My main camera is a Sony a77 SLT. "SLT" means Single Lens Translucent. In other words, it's a DSLR with a fixed translucent mirror that allows light to pass through it rather than a mirror that has to bounce out of the way with a loud "Ka-chunk" sound when a photo is taken. I also use an iPhone. iHeart my iPhone.

Older photos here were taken with a variety of cameras, including a Nikon D7000, D90, D50, a Pentax Optio s5i point & shoot, a Cannon S100 Digital Elph point & shoot I bought for a trip to China in early 2001. My photos from South America were taken with a Pentax IQ Zoom 35mm using piss-poor film and even worse developing. Hey, I was broke and in Bolivia! Whatareyagonnado?