Hi

My name is David Rowell, and I live in Redmond, Washington (a suburb of Seattle, and the home of Microsoft).

I'm originally from New Zealand but have been living in the US since 1985.

I've been a regular visitor to Russian since 1995, and have been collecting Russian stamps since about that time.  During my various visits to Russia I've managed to learn some of the language (but not much!) and have come to love the culture and complexity that is Russia, especially in the former imperial capital, glorious St Petersburg.

As a young boy I had a stamp collection, but it became forgotten and disappeared over time and many moves.  Then, when in Russia, in a gift shop, I was taken by the beauty of some Russian souvenir sheets on sale and purchased them, without really thinking about what I was doing.

The next thing I knew, I was buying more and more stamps, albums to put them in, catalogs to identify and value them, and so on and so on.  I've never stopped since then, as is evidenced by the piles of stamps that can be found in most corners of the house!

Then, just at the time that these activities were slowing down, one fateful night I discovered eBay - a whole new world of buying (and occasionally selling) opportunities opened up to tempt me anew,

Originally my plan was to concentrate on Russia, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, and I thought that I would do Russia first, then move on from there to these other countries.  However, some five years later, I'm still far from mastering the complexities of Russia alone, and so I rather doubt that I'll ever extend to these other countries.  And now this web site is consuming great gobs of time as well - heck, I have a growing pile of unsorted stamps sitting upstairs waiting for me to sort through them while I slave away on the computer downstairs.  I've added a page about the development of the web site which is sort of the other side of the "about me" coin.

The web site is an interesting activity for me.  It reminds me in some ways of the "good old days" of Bulletin Boards - I used to operate what was, back then, a very large BBS in the Puget Sound area - it had seven lines in, with a mix of 2400 and 9600 baud modems (!) and had almost 500MB of online disk, and lots of discussion boards covering all the usual range of topics.  Having just today (I'm writing this paragraph on 11 June 2000) added a discussion board to this site I feel in a way that I'm "going back to my roots" and the web site is hopefully evolving from being a one-way information vehicle from me to you into becoming a more multi-way interchange allowing for information also to freely flow between you as well.

I'm a member of the American Philatelic Society, Rossica, the Australia/New Zealand Society for Russian Philately and the Worldwide Society for Russian Philately.  I also subscribe to the Canadian Society of Russian Philately/s journal (which is how they handle their membership).

When I'm not doing something with my stamps (or, now, web pages!) I'm, umm, err, well, sleeping!  Sometimes my dog does manage to bully me into taking her for a walk, and sometimes my wife manages to bully me into taking her for an outing, too (in return for which she sometimes adds to the more clever parts of this site's "behind the scenes" functioning).  Indeed, I have a fair range of other interests, and the problem is just fitting them all into each 24hr period.

You may have noticed that some of my material on this site betrays a fairly analytical and business type approach to aspects of the hobby, revealing my MBA and business/marketing background - something else I occasionally do inbetween times. :)  And, if you're interested, you're welcome to visit my Travel Information websites that I also publish.

You're welcome to contact me at my email address dr1@rossia.com

Thanks for visiting.  Please visit again as it suits you.