"Don't die with your music still inside of you..."

So why did I do this site?

The short answer: I did it for you. I had some creative energy inside of me that demanded an outlet and I wanted to add one small voice for dreamers and artists in their never-ending battle with logic.

The longer answer: A good friend, Marian, pointed out that I do what I dream. That comment inspired the name and the theme of this website. Mid-life seemed to me like the right time to say unsaid thank yous and do a bit of reminiscing. I was much too close to the 9/11 attacks and have recently lost some people close to me, both of which may also have had an influence on my building this site. I believe that life shouldn't be measured by how many breaths we take, but instead by those moments that take our breath away. I've tried to capture some breathless moments here.

I'd like the site to be meaningful to those directly involved in these pages as well as anyone else who finds their way here on the web. I hope that I have struck a balance of using this public forum without trivializing important relationships and events. This site's predecessor, mackeyinc.com helped renew contacts with several old friends and, based on emails I received, made some small difference to complete strangers on four different continents.

Finally: There is an excellent song in the 1996 Broadway musical Rent called "Seasons of Love" that asks how we measure a life. Is it time passing in minutes, or is it something more substantial? This site includes people and ideas that are more substantial than time for me. The song tells the story more eloquently than I can.

That's the "why", here's the "how"....

Initially, designing and building this website was a labor of love and learning done in my spare time over about three months in spring 2002. It was inspired both by recent experiences and rich memories. Like me, it forever remains a work in progress. I started with the basic navigation structure, then added content, sound and animation in MS FrontPage 2002 and Macromedia Flash MX. Learning Flash for this site was a mission partially tied to my pursuit of art. Adobe Premiere 6.5 and the Windows Media Player add-in to FrontPage were used to add video to the site. The site outgrew its original host in early 2003, so I acquired the new domain, whatIdream.com, revised the structure and moved the site to a bigger hosting service.

The graphics in the upper left corner of most interior pages began with the what I dream logo (see left column). I superimposed a page-specific transparent overlay adjusting the transparency settings with Flash MX drawing tools. Each combined graphic was exported as a jpeg to the page border. The Flash animations on the home page and travel continent pages are overlapping motion tweened fade-in & out pictures set on five to twenty layers each, reduced to a 200x200 pixel stage and then compressed for speed.

This site builds on what I learned doing my first travel site at http://waynemackey.tripod.com and this site's direct predecessor, mackeyinc.com. Those sites have been up since spring 2000 and spring 2002 respectively.

Cameras

Early pictures in the travel pages were taken primarily with Olympus 2 megapixel digital cameras. From August, 2002 through March 2005 most pictures were taken with a Canon 330 2 megapixel digital camera. From March 2005 through November 2006, most pictures were taken with a Canon SD300 4 megapixel digital camera. From November 2006 through early 2007 most pictures and short videos were taken with a Canon A710IS 8 megapixel digital camera. From mid 2007 through early 2010 most pictures and short videos were taken with an 8 megapixel Canon SD870IS. Longer video was taken with a Canon ZR45 digital video camera. From 2010 to 2014 most videos were shot with a Kodak Playsport HD and after that on the Xiaomi Yi action camera.

My current compliment of cameras includes a Nikon D300, D700 and D800E with more lenses than I need, along with two small point and shoots - a 10 megapixel Canon S90 with its underwater enclosure and a 21 megapixel Sony RX100M4. Most pictures are compressed or rescanned to 2400x1800 or smaller. I did digital photo post-processing in Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 6.7, Photomatix Pro 4.2 and Portrait Professional Studio 11. Video editing was done in Adobe Premiere 6.5 and Windows Movie Maker. Scans of non-digital media throughout the site used PaperPort software and a Canon LIDE 200 flatbed scanner.

And finally the "what"...

At its initial release in May 2003, whatIdream.com contained 75 separate public pages and 1 private page, 1371 pictures and 1628 files occupying a total of 211M Bytes of space. There were 258 external hyperlinks and 3332 internal hyperlinks. As of October, 2018 it has grown to 146 separate public pages and 13 private pages, 5118 pictures and 24,829 files occupying a total of 3.4G Bytes of space. whatIdream.com averages about 125,000 hits a month.

Much of this site has evolved from mackeyinc.com, launched in June 2002. I keep it active for business and other casual friends.

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