The pages were meant to be viewed with the default Netscape font, 12 pt. Times Roman. In general, I use a grey background out of preference for ease of reading.
The four suit symbols were built by Rod Roark; the "new" symbol and the brown ball were found on the net without any creator's name given. I built the table marker image with an application that is part of LinkWinds. The new table marker was made with Adobe Photoshop.
The bridge diagrams were generated with one of my bridge typesetting packages. Several other pages were designed that way as well, just for the helpful formatting tools.
Most pages were built with hand-entered HTML, sometimes run through a custom preprocessor.
The bridge movies are generated with a CGI package of my own design.
Perl was very helpful for many of these tools; thanks, Larry Wall.
My home page evolved, and as a result, is a compendium of material on several different topics. This has resulted in a long page. I have chosen to keep it as such rather than break it into pages; one can use the section headers as bookmarks after getting somewhere from the table of contents.
The table of contents and modification date's being noted at the top of the page are by request of Jeff Stern.
Most of the tools used to make these pages are available via the bridge typesetting pages linked to my home page.
All the construction was done in a UNIX environment on Silicon Graphics or Hewlett-Packard workstations. Much of the material was intended for pre-web use.
The background pattern is based on a parchment I stole from an Excite page. I ran it though a 5x5 blur filter to remove most of the high frequencies before I used it, then desaturated it a bit. I used xv to perform those changes. The pages in general are intended to be seen with a monitor with gamma 2.2. Typical PC monitors will make the colors a little more garish.
Ellen Edgerton made the skate icon; Andrew Starr converted it to a gif file.
The dragons and grapevine are from http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/images/ although I do not expect that to be the original source.
The horizontal breakers are from The Icon Bazaar. I desaturated the tile breaker, again using xv. I've found that many web devices are oversaturated. The old English letters are from there, too.
The "d(r)aft" note at the top is a reference to an old joke. Once, long ago, a friend found a PostScript chunk that would draw a nice gray "DRAFT" diagonally across the page, under the text. He used it because he preferred that his documents were only disseminated in their final form. I thought it was a fine description of most of my documents, however, sans the "r."