I began developing this site in the mid 90's, primarily, to provide an on-line information source about gay & lesbian issues. At that time, there was not a lot of information available in Eugene, Oregon, or on-line in general, for someone with questions or who was struggling with "coming out" issues. The local gltb newspaper has ceased publication and the Portland paper, Just Out was hard to find at this end of the valley.
Over the years, the amount of information available on-line has burgeoned. (Just Out is still hard to find in print, and attempts to re-establish a local paper have come to nought.) While the Pink Links are still a part of this site, they are no longer the raison d'etre.
DennisDolan.com exists to indulge my hobbies: playing with computers, web design, and reading.
My addiction to computers began in high school (Cottage Grove—this is the new school; mine was demolished) in the late 60's. In those days, the only computers were room-filling mainframes. We input programs (FORTRAN) using a punched paper tape. The tape was read and the data was sent over telephone lines (some things still haven't changed) to the main frame. If memory serves, which it seems to do less and less lately, the main frame was operated by Oregon Total Information Systems in Eugene, OR, and existed mainly to process report cards and other data for public schools. We, the four or five of us interested in computers, got to play on it when it wasn't running other jobs. The mainframe was, I think, an IBM System/360. Revolutionary in concept and design, the System/360 probably had less raw computing power than the laptop I'm using to hand-code these pages.
Left brain–right brain
Despite the early fascination, computers and computer programming never became more than a hobby for me. Perhaps if my left brain had been more dominant, things might have been different. As it is, the rational-logical mind has never had more than an uneasy alliance with the artistic-intuitive mind. Each, in their way, seeks order out of chaos. My artistic self seeks to order and understand the universe through creative expression: theatre, radio, writing, while the left-brain draws me to technical/mechanical aspects of the arts: lighting design, electronics, automation, web design created through scripts and databases.
My other love, reading, has been with me even longer. In a way, I was a late bloomer when it came to books. Through the third grade and into the fourth, I read picture books, exclusively. I knew them, I loved them, it never occured to me there could be anything else. Then, a librarian noticed that my choice of reading was far below my reading ability and gently steered me to something unimaginable: a book with words but no pictures. It didn't need them, the words created the pictures in my mind! What an amazing invention.
