eddie.hardy1(at)btinternet.com
Czy znacie Państwo ?Hardy?s Internet Guide to Marine Gastropds? ?
Myślę, że na to retoryczne pytanie koncho-Internauci odpowiadają twierdząco, wszak trudno znaleźć witrynę konchologiczną, w której w dziale ?links? nie byłoby odnośnika do: http://www.gastropods.com/ Mimo, iż doskonale wykształcony, a przy tym ceniony przez większość konchistów na świecie ? pozostaje pełnym humoru człowiekiem; otwartym i radosnym.
Eddie Hardy razem z listem przysłał mi kilka fotografii??Zatarłem dłonie?, gdyż niektóre dosłownie kipiały uśmiechem i wydawały się wspaniałym dodatkiem do tego aneksu. Niestety, Eddie Hardy zaznaczył, iż mogę wybrać tylko to jedno ? prezentowane, gdyż na pozostałych wygląda?.itd. A więc przedstawiam ? Eddie Hardy degustujący kuchnię peruwiańską w Limie. Co więcej ? egzotyczna i wykwintna kuchnia, to drugie hobby tego Kolekcjonera.
A tyle ze swojej shell-passion zechciał wyjawić Eddie Hardy za pośrednictwem ?CONCHY? :
/Zamieszczam tekst oryginalny, o co zabiegałem z myślą o kolekcjonerach obcojęzycznych/
?I was born in England in 1944 but spent my childhood travelling with my parents ? Egypt, Singapore, Germany and Hong Kong ? before going to University to study Mathematics in Bristol, England.
My career was varied initially but at the age of 30 I joined the Computer and Data Communications Industry in which I began as a techie. 27 years later I retired having carried out a very wide range of roles in many countries ? including most of Western Europe, USA, Canada, India and Singapore.
I retired so early to travel around the world with my wife (about 5 months a year) and to concentrate on my passion ? seashells.
My hobby began when I was about 30, collecting shells on beaches with our 2 young children. A fateful day came a few years later when I saw a shell for sale in a shop – after that my shell collection grew as rapidly as my bank balance diminished!! My collection is now widespread, roughly 5,000 shells in most families though my favourites (as with so many collectors) are Cones, Cowries and Terebrids.
In the mid 1990?s I confronted the problem of how to catalogue my collection. Being computer-literate I fairly rapidly put together an MSaccess system which has been growing ever since. Later on I needed to improve the presentation of the catalogue so I designed the website in much the form you see it now and wrote a whole load of Visual Basic software to generate the web pages automatically from the database. At this point I also started including references to the books in which I could find my shells. The ?website? was held on my own PC and was only for my private use so It was not made public.
Finally in terms of the web site (nothing is final!) I realised that I might as well include all shells referred to in my books, not only those in my collection, so I began the enormous task of trying to document every single marine gastropod. I realised early on how big the task was so I quickly stopped including Dentaliidae and Bivalves and all other non-Gastropods. I also decided at that time to ignore fossils.
In 1996 when I was living in Amsterdam I got to know the chairman of RIPE, one of the major Internet management organisations in Europe. He was also a professor at Amsterdam University responsible for much of their website activity. He saw my site one day and suggested he put it up for public access. That very first version is still accessible at the University at http://park.org/Guests/Shells/Shell_Catalogue/Shell_Pages/Shell_Catalogue_Home_Page.html
Nowadays my primary interest is the website on which I spend most of my time when I am not travelling. I buy shells around the world while travelling but only in very small numbers now. We moved into a relatively small apartment when I retired (previously having lived in very large houses all around England and Scotland, as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam and Los Angeles) so our space is too limited to increase the collection significantly.
Very Best Regards
Eddie Hardy?