18 September 2025

After many years of service to the U.S. Navy, in uniform and as a civilian, I finally decided to retire in 2025. I have been fortunate to learn and do many interesting things, working with amazing people throughout. Am humbled and grateful to have served with so many talented individuals, always in support of defending our nation and our allies.

However, stepping away from “the long game” is not so easy! There are a number of active projects that I intend to preserve, perpetuate, promote, and continue pursuing. The three main lines of inquiry that I’ve followed may appear at first to be diverse, but all share a common denominator: using science to reflect real world capabilities in virtual worlds (and vice versa) for best insight.

We live in an era of intense specialization, but the biggest challenges are cross-disciplinary by their very nature. Pursuing tough challenges requires understanding relationships, figuring out achievable goals, recognizing blocker problems, devising scalable solutions, and always remembering real-world relevance. Web technologies and Web standards offer many capabilities and best practices, making such big-picture pursuit possible.

I chose the name “Relative Motion” for this consulting company because it is a common concept shared across animated 3D graphics, ocean-going robot operations, and distributed simulation. You don’t have to know your exact coordinates at every moment, if you confidently know which way to move relative to everything else that is happening. Steady progress towards your ultimate goals can then occur, independent of unexpected events.

This personal professional website offers a variety of free assets and ideas. For scalability of Web-size goals, repeatability and interoperability are always essential. Therefore please feel free to adapt, share, and improve anything you find here. If your current challenge requires special assistance, then please let me know what you are thinking. Am always happy to help.

Richard W. Hamming was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century – you can learn much more from him by investigating related resources on this site. He coined many insightful quotes, but his favorite was by Louis Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.” Good luck with your work!

all the best, Don

p.s. thanks to Mike Zyda for teaching me that Motivation is the most important part of any major written effort.