About us

From 1998 to 2009, we were based in Airlie Beach, Queensland, on the beautiful Whitsunday Coast. Eric has some rather out of date pages about Airlie Beach and a new, more critical website he calls Airlie Beach Bum.

We still have the place in Airlie Beach, but our main home is now in Townsville, at the Carlyle Gardens Retirement Resort. Eric has a website called Carlyle Gardens Gnome.

Eric Lindsay

Eric LindsayAn Australian by birth, Eric retired in 1998 from the University of Technology, Sydney, where he had worked as a technical officer in the School of Mathematical Sciences for many years, keeping their computer systems and networks running.

Eric is interested in science, technology, palmtop computers, Apple Macintosh computers, other gadgets of many types, and hard science fiction. When we moved from the Sydney area to Airlie Beach, he had to get rid of thousands of books on many subjects.

Eric has travelled widely in Australia and North America, plus two short trips to the U.K.

Jean Weber

Jean was born and raised in the USA, but has lived in Australia since 1974. Her background is in ecology, but for many years she has been writing and editing computer manuals and other high-tech and engineering documents. She is semi-retired but keeps busy writing books on editing, teaching editing courses, and maintaining several websites, including Technical Editors’ Eyrie and Taming OpenOffice.org.

Jean is interested in plants and animals, ecology, travel, photography, open source software (including Ubuntu Linux) and soft science fiction. She also disposed of many hundreds of books when we moved.

Jean is well travelled, having lived in Japan, Italy and Germany while a child, and having visited much of western Europe, northern Africa, North America, Central America, Australia and New Zealand as an adult.


For several years we travelled in a 4WD motorhome custom-built (not by us) on a Hino truck.