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92990 Pam Niedermayer <pam_pine@c... 2001‑05‑01 Bio
I was told that it's customary to provide a bio before posting here,
so please excuse one prior message without bio. Here we go, mostly the
woodworking and arts related "life forming" events:

I first started woodworking while a teenager in the early '60's, first
project was refinishing a Sears Silvertone guitar that my parents had
given me for Christmas. It had a black body with white striping, I
removed the black and white, took it to the wood, sanded and blo'd it,
and from then on got lots of compliments on my "hand made" guitar. Of
course, the frets were still so far from the finger board that the
strings would eat my fingers if I didn't play for a while, but it
looked real nice, played OK as long as the callouses were formed.

Then I carved a few boats from balsa, with just a plain pocket knife,
turned out pretty well. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to take shop (I
was a girl!), so got the point that woodworking wasn't something that
was a suitable career. I was channeled into university and the like
anyhow, but did manage to buy a little 12' sailboat that a friend had
covered with fiberglass, fixed that up and painted it a bright blue -
it was gorgeous, but too heavy to carry around without a trailer.

At roughly the same time I was made sports editor of the school
yearbook (now that was an achievement in '63, must have been one of
the first female sports editors), whose photographer was particularly
unreliable; so the yearbook gave me a camera to use, got seriously
interested in photography, took some great sports shots, had a great
time laying out the sports section. Here again, something that had to
be more or less abandoned for college, had to go back to little point
and shoot cameras, had no time to play with it seriously.

Then, after university (BA Economics), during most of which I had to
work a heavy part time schedule, I got a programmer trainee job and
set up an apartment. Mom & Dad gave me a few pieces of furniture (end
table, glass paneled china cabinet) they didn't like any more, you
know, the dark painted "mahogany" look, which I didn't like either. So
I stripped them, sanded (have since learned this wasn't all that cool
a way to do this) and blo'd, they were gorgeous oak or white ash, just
beautiful '40's pieces.

A couple of years later, pretty well subsumed by software development
work (also very creative) I met the still current LOML, Jack; and
within a couple of years (1976) we decided to retire for 1.5 years and
travel around North America by motorcycle (I had a little 50cc Honda
during college, upgraded to a 350 Honda when I moved to downtown DC,
both to avoid parking hassles and to be able to take bike/camping
weekends with Jack), take some time for those things work disallowed,
such as photography. I bought a '71 BMW R60/5, rebuilt it for the
trip. Boy did I overpack to start, for the first month of the trip I
was mailing bags home to lighten the load. Only thing bad about this
trip was it gave Mom an excuse to repossess the beautiful china
cabinet and table (which my sister proceeded to ruin with an
"antiquing" finish popular during the '70's). We ended up living in an
apartment near the beach in San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico for most of a year.

At any rate, I had the time to really study photography (the USIA had
a great library of books in English at the consulate in Guadalajara),
fell in love with it; so when we moved back to DC, I took some photo
classes, fell even more in love with it. Then in '79 we moved to
Boston, bought a house. Yahoo! It had a garage, I could set up my own
little workshop, which I did, primarily to build darkroom furniture
for the second bedroom. At the same time (late '81), I got fed up with
working for the guys who owned the big computers, absolutely loved
building software, but hated the work environments, the politics,
etc.; so I quit, built my darkroom, tried to be a professional
photographer, took many art classes at the Boston MFA school. I ran
out of money two years later (turns out the photography business
involves too high a percentage of time selling yourself, not enough
photography and darkroom work), I went back to software, but as a
parttime consultant, photography became a strong hobby again, as did
woodworking, but not too productive a time, too much software, not
enough fun.

Jack and I started a software development business in '84 (Pinehill),
which took all our time and then some, not too much left for fun
things since we did consulting work merely to fund product
development, which we had to do in our "spare" time. We moved to Cape
Cod in late '91 (huge recession, had to realize our profits on the
house in Boston to survive), continued with business related things
being the primary concentration. When in '98 it became obvious that
not only wasn't Bell Atlantic going to get us high speed telecom
(which as a software company we had to have) at a reasonable price any
time soon, neither was anyone else, we tried to start a phone company
on the Cape, but were unable to get the right people and money
together, so we moved to Austin, TX, where at least SBC was allowing
some local competition. We moved in Oct, '99 because a truly crummy
company called Flashcom promised that they could provide reasonably
priced (for a small company) service in Austin at that time.

They lied, and continued to do so for most of 2000, but had us tied up
contractually; so we had no choice but to just do consulting, which
left time for fun. I got involved in digital photography (living in an
apartment for our first year, would take a while to get a darkroom set
up), which got me involved in large format photography (too long a
story), which got me involved in making my own wooden view camera,
since nothing on the market was the right combination of weight and
function. I designed this really cool camera, but I only had this 6' X
12' balcony for a "shop", so decided to take a neander approach, not
too cool trying to set up a table saw and run it in an apartment.
Well, that was the missing piece, I am now totally subsumed in
acquiring and learning how use untailed tools and loving it.

And bless those creeps who ran the apartment complex, they told us
we'd have to pay double rent (already overpriced) for a partial year
lease, so we devoted all last summer to finding, buying, moving into a
new old house. It needs some renovations; but most important, it came
with a semi-solid 10x12 woodworking workshop-to-be on 1/4 acre, and is
only a couple of miles from the office downtown. I'm in heaven, fixing
up the workshop, gardening (house was rented for 10 years, guess what
kind of shape the yard is in), playing with hand tools, fixing up the
house, refining the camera design, building some new tools, studying
Japanese woodworking tools and technique. This is what I should have
been doing all along. I still consult about 20 hours per week average
(works great, get to take an Odate class on shoji screen making while
on a client visit early next month), but for now woodworking is my
primary interest.

This turned out longer than I'd thought it would be, so apologies if
it's too long.

Pam

-- 
Pamela G. Niedermayer
Pinehill Softworks Inc.
600 W. 28th St., Suite 103
Austin, TX 78705
512-236-1677
http://www.pinehill.com



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