PENCELAND.com

by Eric Pence

(contact me)

Me in 2018

Eric & Patti

My name is Eric Pence. I have been married to Patti since 1979. I created this website, PENCELAND.com, in 1994, and continue to modify it and add pages to it. I got my first email account at that time. We have grown kids (Alex and Ben, born in the 1980s, both college graduates). We live in Hingham, Massachusetts (a Boston suburb on the coast) on Otis Hill and we have views (see Our house for details).

Go to About Me for more details about my life, and My Career for a history of my working life.

I was born in 1948 so I'm a "baby boomer". I turned 70 in 2018 and retired. Now my life consists of walking our 2 dogs twice a day and taking our household trash to the "dump" every week. (The "dump" was a "landfill" when we moved to Hingham in 1982 but it became a "transfer station" in 2000.)

I grew up in Payette, Idaho. After high school I went to college for 2 years (1966-68) at University of Idaho in Moscow (here's an aerial view of Moscow and my home state college where both of my parents had graduated), where I majored in Mechanical Engineering. I took a break from college and moved to Seattle, where I lived for 5 years and I had long hair and experimented with psychodelic drugs like we did in the late-60s. Because I wasn't going to college I lost my 2-S student-deferment draft classification and I got drafted in 1969, and because of my beliefs (this was during the Vietnam War and I was very anti-war!) I was a draft resister (this caused a little termoil in my life but that is ancient history now). I had taken up guitar in college and started playing jazz, so I came to Boston in 1973 to study jazz at Berklee College of Music and I switched from guitar to upright bass (I found out that Berklee had an abundance of guitar players and a shortage of bass players). I went to Berklee for a couple of years (1973-1975) but then I discovered computers and went to several more schools in Metro-Boston to study computer programming, and I eventually graduated in 1983 and became a computer programmer and had a great career until I retired in 2018. For 35 years I commuted from Hingham (where we live) to jobs in Boston by boat.

Our Hingham houses

Patti

I met Patti in 1977 (she was a student at B.U.) when she had just bought a house in Weymouth (a Boston suburb) with a fenced-in yard (she said she was just tired of walking her dog in parks in the city) and I was still living in an apartment in Boston (I lived there during the Blizzard of '78, a notorius snow storm we had that February), and I moved into her house with her in 1978 (after the storm) and we got married in 1979 (the year Patti graduated from college). Since 1977 we've owned 3 suburban houses on the South Shore—we lived in our first house in Weymouth for 5 years (1977-1982) until we lost it in a fire in 1982, then we moved to Hingham into our 2nd house (first Hingham house) where we lived for 34 years (1982-2016) and raised our two sons, and after they had graduated from college and were grown up and gone, we were "empty-nesters" for 8 years and we decided that our large, 3-story, 5-bedroom, Victorian house was too big for just the 2 of us and it was time to downsize, so we sold it in 2016 and bought our 3rd house (second Hingham house) where we still live.

The boys
Our 2 sons live far away—Alex lives in Brooklyn, NY (he graduated from college in New York City at the The New School in Greenwich Village, and married his college sweetheart Laura, but they are divorced now), and Ben graduated from George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC, and after college lived in San Francisco for years, then New York City, and moved to Taipei, Tawan, for several years and now is staying with us and traveling around the U.S. He had planned to live in Lisbon, Portugal, so we will see what happens. (Read more about them here.)

My family
I can't express how proud I am to have 2 grown sons, both college graduates! Now that Alex & Ben are grown up and live elsewhere, our home family consists of Patti and me, our 2 dogs, Casey & Quinn, and a cat, Pepper (our other cat, Mandy, we had for 17 years and she died in 2018!).

Eric & Patti

Alex & Ben

Casey & Quinn

Pepper

Mandy

Family photo

Family news

Go to...

was launched in 1994 to share things that interest me, express some philosophy and opinions, put up family photos and information, provide links to interesting sites, and just simply to entertain. Generally speaking, the content of the site is what I consider interesting, amusing, stimulating, educational, technical, totally non-commercial, and hopefully non-offensive—and I try to verify that my links go to sites with the same standards.

There is a menu bar above with links to the website pages

on this site, and the icons above them are links to various locations on the site. Each page has a menu across the top with links to a

| Page section |

for the page on display, and on the title-bar of each page is a drop-down Site index menu providing direct access to the other pages. To speed up the loading of the pages I have tried to minimize the size of graphics that will immediately appear, and I have provided small thumbnail images to click on to see enlargements of the photos. In some places I put a

to click on to go to the top of the current page or a

to click on to go to the top of the current section.

Links on the webpages are displayed in several colors (your browser must allow webpages to choose their own colors for these to work in CSS):

links to remote websites (blue) - displays in a new tab
links to places in PENCELAND.com (green) - same tab, current page replaced with new page

Except for a little section on Family news the site is not a blog with frequent updates (for that see me on Facebook) but as I discover new web methods and as my passions for things change I will continue to make regular additions and modifications. I try to keep things accurate, and update or remove things that are no longer valid, but technology changes can occur faster than my website updates, so some things may not always be current.

Removed pages – these pages are no longer on the menu bar above but I didn't delete them and they still exist on PENCELAND. I have links on my website going to them.

Now that I'm retired I keep this website up as a hobby. When people suggest I should do something in web-development in my retirement, since I worked as a web-developer, I want to tell them my web skills are very old. Though in my jobs I created interactive web applications in Perl and Java and even have a few Perl apps on my pages I mostly code my whole website in HTML and JavaScript and don't use any web-development tools that current web developers have. On some pages I put links to views of Perl scripts showing you the code that is producing the page.

I have been doing this for many years and it hasn't evolved much, and the only coding I do now is on this website. I started coding for this website in 1994 and I created every piece of every page in a text editor (Textpad), and that is what I continue to do. Our son, Ben, is a programmer (he graduated from college in 2011 with a degree in Computer Science), so let him do the new stuff. As I said, my web skills are pretty old, I learned programming in the early 1980s, before the Internet even existed! In the 1990s I learned HTML and created this website.

For years I surfed the web and had email, but for a truly "interactive" experience I created a Facebook page.

This site was created on a Windows PC but I have since discovered if you view it on a mobile device (tablet or phone) it may not view the same. Sorry.

Enjoy your visit and come back soon.