About Michael E. Taylor.....

• Here's my collection of aerial photos of the San Jacinto River. These are great!
• Take a look at an aerial view of my river from the Hwy 90 bridge.
• A little closer view of Banana Bend from the air.
• Here's a view of my neighborhood before the 1994 Flood. Notice all the houses gone!

A lot of my spare time these days is tied up with the repair of my house The watershed that feeds the river I live on averaged 18" of rain over a 2 day period, sending record amounts of water down our river. It also blasted the crap out of my house. Click here for before and after pictures of my house. Here's a before and after shot of my boat house and pier. Notice the island with all the trees across the river in the before shot. The island and all the trees are "gone" in the after shot. The flood literally cut a new river through our subdivision, taking about 8 houses, foundation and all with it. My house is the only one still standing that was right on the river, and it was damaged pretty badly.

        In my free time I work as an Electrician for the largest beer company in the world where I perform electrical maintenance on the control systems used in the brewing of beer. I'm also a member of International Brotherhood of Electrical Worker Local Union 716 (IBEW). I mostly work with the Allen Bradly series of programmable controllers (PLC's) with UNIX based Factory Link servers and Window NT and UNIX Powerstation client workstations. We tie it all together using a Ethernet based network and multiple IBM RS-6000 RISC servers running AIX. We access and program the PLC's using ICOM based software on various PC platforms. Our instruments are mostly Rosemount based, but also include a variety of other brands too numerous to mention. I also change a lot of light bulbs!

        I am an avid computer/electronics hobbyist having started out with some of the old CP/M based Kaypro II's (used a Z-80 at a whopping 8Mhz and 64K of memory after a few modifications). I think I could still dig up an old TI 99/4A. I advanced with my hobby learning Assembly, C, Pascal, UNIX (ala Linux), and a jillion other software packages along the way, including, unfortunately telecommunications packages. I currently operate a 450mhz Pentium III, using Linux 2.2.x and Win98 and I got a little file and dial-in server on my junker P200 w/ 64meg ram running RedHat Linux 2.0.36 and about 5gig of hard disk space, a SCSI card, CD-ROM, Microtec Scanmaker (hence all the pictures!),a cheepie sound card and an Epson Stylus printer (possibly the coolest color printer I've ever used). Yeah.. I know... I'm like the auto mechanic that drives around a trashed out car, but it gets me around and Linux even makes a old computer useful.

        I use a PPP account and a US Robotics 56.6 stanadalone to access the net. I access the WWW with Netscape Communicator 4.07 (both Linux and Win98 versions). . If you don't have this version, I highly recommend getting it. Beats the crap out of Explorer.

Let's see...what else?

        Well... I'm 6'4" and about 230# short brown hair. I'm half Irish and half mutt..(a lot of indian). I have family all over east Texas. I have family in such familiar places as Corrigan, Goat Hill, Trinidad, (the city, not the country), Malakoff, Lufkin, and a bunch of other places spread over East and North Texas. I have a brother, Glenn who lives in Pasadena.

That about covers it for me! Workin and partying on the river. What else do I need???

(less work!!! )

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