Welcome to Petyr Rolls.

PetyrRolls is intended to be a platform for a variety of subjects of interest to me and with which I occupy my retirement years. I hope they will be of interest to you too regardless of your age. In my opinion one’s years of retirement are an opportunity to do things of importance to humanity and the environment that the confines of employment do not allow. Hopefully the areas of expertise that I did develop to become an employable individual can be used for more altruistic objectives.

As a basic and applied research chemist, I have mastered many different subject matters and have expanded those to fields not necessarily of obvious relationship to being a chemist. I am a firm believer that a basic understanding of physics, chemistry and mathematics are the fundamental tools to understand Geology, Hydrology, Computer Science, Analytical Chemistry, Materials Science and so on. Unfortunately, many fields of study have purposefully and inadvertently developed their own language to describe exactly the same physical and chemical phenomena. Hidden within the language of these fields are assumption that are unstated. One has to be careful to read between the lines.

Currently, I am interested in Graphical Information System (GIS) mapping in order to study local Geology and Hydrology and to design Water Trails along the Yakima River and the Tri-Cities (Richland, Pasco and Kennewick) area of the Columbia River. You will find links to the left to explore the water trails and my summaries of the local geology and hydrology.

I also have written a few short stories, primarily based upon fictionalization of my youth. You might find these of interest. Links also to the left.

As an analytical chemist, with a long-standing interest in Electrical Engineering and Computer Programming, I am focused on developing water quality analysis systems with open-source hardware and software. The objective is to give the general public a broader capability to inexpensively monitor the quality of their water.

There are boat loads of more subjects that I intend to include, including building kayaks. I hope you will check back to see what’s new.

I keep some info on GitHub. I also have Linked-In and Facebook pages but these are not useful social media primarily because they are useful for short format comments or statements but totally irrelevant for recording my actual thinking. You might find I announce an update to this website on Facebook. If you want to collaborate with me on some subject matter, you can contact me by decoding the contact info.

WARNING: many sections may have headers, buttons or links but there may not be any content of the content does not make sense. Please ignore these. This is the second version of my web site and I still have a lot of material to create as well as clean up the formatting. I did not use WordPress for this obviously. I coded it directly in html css and javascript. So for now, please appreciate the vintage look.