My name is Dave Ayers and I hope you will be a frequent visitor to the Orlop. What is an Orlop, you ask? It is the lowest deck on an Age of Sail man-of-war, well below the waterline where the cables are stowed. It's also a good place for a foremast jack to hide for a catnap. I learned this from reading Patrick O'Brian sea novels, and since my computer workstation is also below the water line and I have been known to sneak a nap there, I thought it would make a good name for this blog.

I discovered blogging several years ago when my son Larry, a natural-born blogger, discovered the wonders of WordPress, a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. (Their words, not mine.) Anyway, some five years, 680 articles and thousands of words later, I'm still at it, a testimony to this easy-to-use program and the therapy of wordsmithing.