Home page for

Michael Hayward

started working for SFU's Computing Services in 1988, moving to the Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver in 1992, where I worked until retiring from SFU in 2016. During my time at SFU I provided technical support to the user community, and administered the Publishing Lab, a Macintosh lab originally built to support the Master of Publishing program. I also taught courses on Dreamweaver, QuarkXpress and InDesign through SFU’s Continuing Studies department, and I continue to teach an online InDesign course once a year. Since 1994 I have lived in Deep Cove, B.C., a small community at the foot of Mount Seymour, with the love of my life, Jean Karlinski.

I received a B. Sc. degree in Math and Computer Science from UBC in 1976, and in 1996 completed my Master of Publishing degree from SFU, after 5 years of part-time study.

I’ve been an avid cyclist for many years, love to read, and can think of few things more appealing than cycling along the backroads of France with some fresh bread, a chunk of Comté cheese, and a juicy, red tomato. And perhaps a good book or two, and a notebook in which to jot down idle thoughts...

What else can I say...

The Van Morrison website
For many years I ran an unofficial website devoted to the miusic of Van Morrison. The site began as a personal hobby back in 1995, at a time when Van did not yet have his own offical website, and the contents expanded over the years, incorporating contributions from Van's fans worldwide. The site was online for thirteen years, and attracted a wide audience among Van fans, with a full discography, a bibliography, an archive of interviews, and an annotated set of lyrics. In the end, though, the hassles of trying to stay on the good side of Van's management just weren't worth the rewards, so I took the site down in 2008.

Writing and design
In the early days of blogging, from June 2002 to January 2009, I tinkered away intermittently at a somewhat literary weblog, published at www.textsandpretexts.com. I used the Moveable Type blogging software (free at the time) and the Textile markup language, created by the late Dean Allen. I even bought a "lifetime" hosting package from textdrive.com (another Dean Allen undertaking). textdrive.com eventually got swallowed by a bigger company and went defunct—they don't make lifetimes like they used to!—and my weblog died with it (though I still own the domain name!) Since those days I've published several other blogs that document some of our travels. The most recent of these, from 2023, will link you to the rest: danubetodalmatia.wordpress.com

When I first put this site together I included a few sketchy examples of my MPub course work, plus some small-press book-design projects that I’ve done over the years.

The obligatory reference to Paris...
I fell in love with Paris during my first visit there, in 1980, as part of an extended bicycling trip through Europe. Since then I’ve seized every opportunity to return...