Welcome to my site! I'm Eiki Martinson. Pronounce it like "Ache-y". It would be the surprise of my life if you came up with a new joke about my name, so don't try. Here's my end of the standard dialogue I go through probably five times a week (see if you can fill in the blanks!):
Me: Eiki Martinson. Nice to meet you.
You: ___________________________________
Me: Yes, I've heard the Billy-Ray Cyrus song.
You: ___________________________________
Me: It's from Estonia, actually.
You: ___________________________________
Me: South of Finland.
I was born in 1978 in Hollywood, Florida. My hobbies are reading, building electronic and mechanical devices, and conducting experiments of questionable scientific merit though considerable entertainment value (at least to me). Occasionally I try my hand at the visual arts, with some not-entirely-awful results.
I have a taste for unusual forms of athletic activity; I was a martial artist for many years, a fencer after that, and am currently rock climbing twice a week at an indoor climbing gym.
I have two cats, brother and sister from the same litter, that I adopted from the street at 6 weeks of age. Their names are Miuks and Murakas.
Professional and Academic Life
I went to Florida Atlantic University for my undergraduate education, finishing with an unusual combination of BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering ("like oil and water" said one advisor). My senior project, The Pipe Crawler, combined these fields in a satisfying way.
Although I swore up and down that I'd stay out of graduate school, finally a tempting enough offer reached my ears from one of my former professors, and I returned to pursue my MS degree in Electrical Engineering, conducting research in a new method of saltwater desalination.
At present, I work as an electrical engineer at CBM of America in Deerfield Beach, Florida, for which I design and support telecommunications hardware for Verizon and other clients.
You may want to read my résumé in HTML or PDF form.
Other Sites
I have accounts on some other sites:
- Follow my Twitter feed, if you have any interest in keeping up with my everyday activities.
- Flickr — for some pictures not found here.
- LinkedIn — for "professional development" and networking.
- World66 — maintains a map of the various countries and American states you've visited or lived in. Click the link to see mine.
- Last, visit my Amazon.com wishlist if by some miracle you'd like to buy me a gift.
My apologies to my more socially-networked readers, but I'm still holding out against Facebook and Myspace.
Collaborators
Many of the projects detailed in these pages could not have happened without the enthusiastic particaption of my fellow adventurers:
Jay Wilson
I met Mr. Wilson in 8th grade and we've been best of friends ever since. We later went to university together; he graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering and is currently Chief Technology Officer at RMS Networks in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Mark Miller
Mark was one of my partners on the Pipe Crawler project at FAU and later became my roommate, which is an amazing fact considering how often senior project teams came to an end in bitter recriminations, threats of violence, and in at least one case, actual lawsuits. He is presently an electrical engineer at CUES in Orlando, working on, of all things, pipe-inspection robots.
Sheraz Wasi
Mr. Wasi is my other Pipe Crawler partner. He graduated with his BSEE in 2004 and is partly responsible for many of the unusual and dangerous experiments you see here.
Friends
Not many of my friends have sites to link to. In fact, only one does: fellow FAU engineer Melissa Morris.
Colophon
This site has been up in some form or another since 2003. I redesigned it in 2008. Everything here should be standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. Seriously, run the validators linked to at the bottom of every page—I don't think anything fails but I'd like to know if it does. Everything should look fine in Mozilla, IE 6 and above, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, lynx, and probably others as well.
Design geeks may like to know that, following recent CSS trends, I composed everything to a 21-pixel vertical rhythm. You can verify this by clicking the checkbox at the bottom of all of the pages. This runs a bit of javascript that will display a 21px pattern of horizontal rules (and sets a cookie so that your preference will persist).
Maintaining the vertical rhythm across images of unpredictable height is tricky. As an experiment, I wrote some javascript to grab the heights of each block of images (I had been coding these as a div or paragraph of class "textimage" for a long time) and adjust line-height and margins for each block accordingly. I won't claim this is worth doing for commercial sites or as a best-practice; I did it purely to see if I could. It works in firefox at least.
Images are displayed using the popular Lightbox (version 2) script by Lokesh Dhakar. I use it in the ordinary way, with only a few tweaks to paths and such. Although it seems I am relying on quite a lot of javascript on this site, none of it is strictly necessary. Turn it off and everything still works just fine, although it might not look or behave quite as nicely.
The blog features of eikimartinson.com are running on the open source Serendipity software; the theme you see here is a custom Smarty template I wrote to work with this. I also wrote my own version of the "archives" plugin so that the output would consist of an unordered list instead of a collection of <br/> tags and so forth. Something like this will probably be standard in some upcoming release of Serendipity, at which point I'll just let my fork die and use the official version instead.
Everything here is maintained in various Subversion repositories, one for the static pages, css, and javascript files, one for my Serendipity template, and one each for the plugins I wrote.