I truly love the city of Portland, Oregon but it seems Portland didn't like me much. I moved there, with my college girl friend, in March of 1978, upon taking a career job with the US Army Corps of Engineers. The position seemed an ideal fit with my recently acquired Masters in Geography. The move proved disastrous, however, for my relationship. I stayed with my new found career and she returned to Los Angeles. It's impossible to tell from this distance but I suspect my life would have been much more stable had I stayed with the relationship rather than the job. For whatever it is worth I enjoyed my job but I didn't fit in with the Corps very well and they managed to finally be rid of me after about six years. I retained a fascination with GIS, Geo-based Information Systems, and still do.

I left Portland in 1986 after a failed attempt to start a GIS business, a great idea with a lousy business plan. My partner, a local graphic artist, decided to not spend his agreed upon portion of our startup capital. He told me that his friends had convinced him that the business was a bad idea. We had acquired a RIPS. This was a CP/M based computer that could perform density slices on black and white photographs thus creating false color images. This was great stuff for analysis of aerial photography. We had a b/w video camera for digitizing images and a color printer (that used a ribbon). The computer had two floppy disk drives. These were the original floppy disks, plastic sheets inside paper envelopes. One disk contained the program and the second contained the data.

Anyway, my partner bailed and I returned to Los Angeles to try and find new funding. I sold my 1980 Datsun pickup with 4Wheel drive and gave him the money to try and appease the finance company a bit longer. While I was in LA he informed me that he had shipped all the equipment to the venture capital company. I took a drive to their office and found the pieces of our system strewn about on an office floor. It seems it was never properly packed for shipping and all the parts took a severe beating while in transit. There was nothing anyone could do to save the business now. I've not heard from any of my "friends" in Portland since. I suspect they all think I bailed on my partner. Most everyone has now heard of GIS, witness Google maps and Google Earth.

These two events form the bookends to my life in Portland, Oregon. I still think it's a beautiful place but it didn't seem to like me much.