Welcome

My page has moved around a bit over the years, but you can always access it as http://www.eldacur.com/~brons/, the name it has had for more than a dozen years. Any links to my pages should be made to eldacur.com rather than whatever ISP (Comcast, AT&T, RCN or Ultranet) I'm using at the time.

Nerd Corner and Eldacur Technologies
For the last year I have been working as a software development contractor, doing business under my usual DBA, "Eldacur Technologies". While this has been successful, I am now venturing into new territory.

After considering the fact that a number of the most skilled engineers, techies and nerds I know are underemployed, while at the same time running a small or medium-sized enterprise is requiring more and more technology, I have decided to try to put together a team of freelancers, with an eye towards providing top flight IT and technical support to the small and medium business community and residential users.

I will be pulling the first elements of this team in the next week or so, and beginning the process of refining our plans and business model. If I or one of my colleagues has contacted you regarding this, or one of the Eldacur Technologies business cards I have been circulating brought you here, please call me at the number listed on my card, or the one listed at the bottom of this page (978-897-3153).

Watch this space.

Recent Additions (March 28, 2007)

Vox Libertas
Due to what I see as a serious threat to our basic liberties and rights, and a shift towards authoritarian rule, I started a blog, Vox Libertas, which is available on six major blogging services. Please, join me there, and more importantly, join me in speaking out for liberty. Vote. Write and call your representatives. Talk to your family and friends. It can be found here at Eldacur.com or in the following blog services:
Vox LiveJournal Blogger/
BlogSot		 MySpace The Daily Kos Progressive
Historians

Composite black and white picture of us all.
The immediate family as seen on EPCOT's "Leave a Legacy". Larger versions and a other pics are on my vacation pictures page.

Hi, I'm Jim Burrows, also known as Brons or JimB (it rhymes with limb). I'm a self-proclaimed nerd and an aging hippy living Ward Cleaver's life. I live in Maynard, Massachusetts, USA, Earth, with my wife, Selma; our sons Brendan, Morgan and Ian (who is back for the summer from college), our cats Devil, Hillary and Tomokato, (Devil's adventure up the tree is in a page of its own) and Colby, who is probably a miniature black/apricot phantom poodle, but may be a Cockapoo. (He's a 9/11 FEMA fosterling.)

I went to school at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. My hobbies and interests include science fiction and other trashy books, movies and TV (I even review some of the books I read), Tai Chi Chuan, story-telling (see my musings page), computers (it's neat getting paid to do things you would do anyway), role playing (fantasy role playing games, murder mysteries, on-line gaming), genealogy, philosophy, designing clothes, art, and lots more.

Burrowing in the Family Roots

Genealogy has long been a hobby of mine, and so of course I've posted my data on the Web, not once, but twice. The current up-to-date version is to be found spread over a couple of sites. The main access point and index is on our family pages. The full GEDCOM data is stored over at the WorldConnect Project on the RootsWeb site. A set of simple 6-generation pedigree charts serves as the main index into it from our pages. There are also Research Notes for my active research on the Anderson, Blue, Brown, Burrows, Claypool, Stull and other families.

A more out-of-date version can still be found on-line as well. One of my programming projects years back was creating a program that would turn my Burrows family genealogy database into English text. The result isn't going to dazzle anyone with its prose style, but think it's pretty readable and less intimidating to non-genealogists. (Most of the pages are small.) Unfortunately, a lot has happened since I created those pages. I've stopped working at DEC, moved my genealogy database to different software, and continued to do research. As a result, the pages are substantially out of date.

Blue Family Association One of the parts of the family that I've made notable progress on is my great-grandmother, Iona Blue Burrows's family, in large part due to having my pages on the web. As you can see from my obsolete pages, I'd done a fair amount of speculation about how the Blue portion of the tree might be structured, based on census records and what I learned from doing first-hand research In Iowa. A couple of fellow Blue genealogists (no, we don't look like Smurfs), saw my pages and e-mailed me. They pointed me to the Blue Family Association, which my wife and I have become very active in.

The Extended Family

And here's a picture of my extended family, or more correctly, the family of my aunt, Elizabeth Ellen Burrows Macleod Benchley Fisher, who a few years back. The picture was taken at the reception after her funeral, or perhaps I should say the pictures, since this is actually a composite of three very similar pictures. I couldn't resist a tad of Photoshopping to get better shots of a few people who were obscured in the main picture.


Solar System and Planet Simulations

I managed to make it on CNN a few years back, but sadly it was through a complete misunderstanding of some of my work. I have two long standing projects to do simulations of solar system formation and fractal planet generation. So, in 2000, when scientists actually found a new planet around Epsilon Eridani, they searched the web for references and found a randomly generated solar system I had created around that star.

The easiest way to see StarGen in action is the Web Interface, though there are command-line version available that run on Mac OS and Windows.

The Friday Night game

For more than twenty years I've been hosting and/or running a weekly Fantasy Role Playing Game. For most of that time the game was held on Tuesday at our house. A few years back, we've moved it to Friday nights at Barry Tannenbaum's house. We put the weekly logs and other material about the most recent campaign on-line. The entry points are:

The game is played by a home brewed set of rules that we've developed over the last 16 years or so. The rules are called FuRPiG and are, perhaps, rather what you would get if GURPS were developed from Chaosium's Runequest or Basic Role Playing rather than The Fantasy Trip. A preliminary draft of the latest version is available as a PDF file on the Eldacur Annex.

Thoughts and Musings, Tales and Myths

Over the last couple of years I've developed a small collection of essays and other writings here on my Web site. The Bardic Musings page is where I've collected them. This section includes things like:

Art Challenge

Inspired by a gift from my mother, I have a bit of a challenge (and of course a dollop of opinion regarding art, history and the world) on my Mystery Artist page. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed both my mother's gift and the hunt for other pictures to illustrate the challenge with.

Comic Books

A couple years ago, I started reviewing comic books, especially with an eye towards the positive trends that I see in the field. Actually, many of these trends reflect trends in the art world and our society at large. As you will find if you read my pages on trashy fiction and its relationship of trash to art, I think that both heroic fiction and illustration are very important, that they speak to us and about us.

Seeing heroism and solid art return to the comics, and strong independent female characters as opposed to the demonized "bad girls" is very encouraging to me. If you've been turned off by comics in the last few years, or never really enjoyed them, take a look at my page and some of the comics reviewed there.

The Nerd Corner

The Nerd Corner is where I keep all my computer-related stuff, along with an explanation of why I decided that being called a nerd wasn't so bad. Several of the pages in the Corner are where I distribute the various bits and pieces of freeware I've made over the years. Some of the things in the Nerd Corner include:

Friends on the Web

Having been on the net since about 1973, I've quite a few friends on the Internet. These days that's coming to mean having a Web page. Here's a partial list of Web pages of folks I've known and worked with. They're all oddballs, Mill Rats, SF fans or all of the above. (If I've missed yours, send me mail.)

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Sign me:
Brons aka JimB. aka Jim Burrows

Jim Burrows
8 Howard Rd
Maynard, MA 01754

Phone: 978-897-3153
E-mail: brons@eldacur.com