Matthew E. Salek: Life Story
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Born: January 1978, Winona, Minnesota
Where I've Lived:
- April 2003 - Present: The west side
of Aurora, Colorado, the state's third-largest city
- 2000 - 2003: An island of unincorporated Arapahoe
County, Colorado sandwiched between Denver and Aurora
- 1996 - 2000: Fort Collins, Colorado. Big-town
amenities, small-town feel
- 1978 - 1996: Winona, Minnesota. A beautiful, quiet
town of 30,000 on the Mississippi River about 100 miles
downstream of the Twin Cities
Education:
- Washington-Kosciusko Elementary School (pronounced ka
SHOOSH ko, it's Polish)
- Winona Middle School
- Winona Senior High School, graduated May 1996
- Colorado State
University, Fort Collins, Colorado. Graduated May
2000 with a BS in civil engineering.
Current Employment: Civil engineer at an engineering
consulting firm in Denver. Mainly I work in roadway and
drainage design.
Professional Registration: I'm licensed as a Professional Engineer in Colorado
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My Car:
2006 Subaru Forester
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Hobbies, Pasttimes and Favorites:
- This website.
- Living in Colorado means I go
bicycling and walking in the summer and skiing in the winter. My
favorite place to ski is Copper Mountain.
- Reading: After years of not using it, I've rediscovered the library.
- TV: I watch the news, The Simpsons, Survivor,
and the Discovery Channel.
- Music-wise,
I'll listen to pretty much anything except rap and hard rock. My favorite
radio stations in Denver are 97.3-KBCO and Mix-100.3.
Boy
Scouts:
From 4th Grade through high school I was active in the Boy
Scouts of America Troop 11 and became an Eagle Scout. Interesting things I got to do as a Boy Scout:
- I have been canoeing in the Boundary Waters twice: 1993 in
Quetico Provincial Park, and 1995 on the U.S. side.
- In 1992, my troop went hiking for a week in Grand Teton
National Park. You haven't lived until you put something called
"swiss cheese spread with imitation bacon bits" on hard round
things called "pilot biscuits".
- How about sleeping outside when the mercury hits -20F? I got
to do that when we went Winter Camping in 1994. No frostbite!
- All together, I have been on 28 weekend campouts and five
week-long summer campouts.
- I got my first job through the Boy Scouts. During the summers
of 1993, '94, and '95, I worked as a camp counselor at Camp Kahler
in Rochester, MN.
About MESalek.com
My website premiered when I got to Colorado State in August 1996. Since then it has been a slowing evolving, ongoing work in
progress. Back in the first couple of months, there were many false
starts, and I have added and deleted numerous subject areas. The College of Engineering's network at CSU served as my first web
host, but in 1999 my site had gotten too big so I moved it over to
Xoom.com, a free service similar to Geocities. They changed to NBCi.com
in 2000, and went belly-up in 2001. That prompted me to get paid web
hosting and my own domain, and MESalek.com was launched July 18, 2001.
Why would someone spend a good chunk of their free
time on something like an Internet site? I'm not sure. All I know is
I enjoy doing it and get a sense of accomplishment. You could think
of it as a creative, artistic outlet. We all need to do something
that expresses our creativity. And if you have a hobby/interest that
you know a lot about and enjoy, you can do great things with a
computer.
As to the main subject of this site being roads, that comes simply
from the fact that roads are what I'm interested in. Some people cuss
at them when stuck in traffic. Some people wish there were fewer of
them. Some people don't think about them at all. Me, I'm interested
in lots things related to roadways, from how highways get their
numbers to the configuration traffic lights at intersections. This
may seem pretty dry and uninteresting to some people, but everybody
has their passion. The great thing about the Internet is that
I can post what I know for everyone else who has the same interests
as me to see. Even better is that I've been able to channel this
interest into my career, civil engineering.
Some of the hardware, software, and accessories used in the
production of this site:
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Apple 20" iMac, 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, DVD-RW drive, OS 10.5.1
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Canon CanoScan LiDE 90 scanner
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Pentax Optio M20 digital camera, 7.0 megapixel, 6.3-18.9mm zoom
(April 2007-present)
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Pentax IQZoom EZY-R 35mm camera, 38-70mm zoom
(April 2000-March 2007)
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Continue:
Last updated 19 January 2008
