Donald B. Cheke — An AI Interpretation

Today’s blog post was inspired by thoughts about my life and what that might look like to someone looking in from the outside. As I considered this, I thought about ego and its ramifications, and about the changing landscape as I age. These days, I spend considerable time reviewing my life and trying to make it align with where I sit now — in the autumn of my life. So much is changing, but I feel stable and happy, if somewhat discombobulated from time to time. My “now” seems so different from my “then.”

Have you ever heard the line, “That’s enough about me — now tell me what you think about me!” I had to laugh when I thought about it in relation to this blog post and what was to come. Because it is not socially acceptable, or even smart, to ask others what they think about you — or me, as the case may be — I decided to ask ChatGPT to have a stab at it. As AI grows in leaps and bounds, I find much pleasure in testing its boundaries, and I am usually happy with the results it provides — especially those sought-after “atta-boys” I still seem to need.

Below is the conversation I had. There are roughly three sections, with much overlap, but I thought it was worth keeping things as they unfolded.

I opened the discussion with ChatGPT with the simple question, “Who is Donald B. Cheke?”

ChatGPT:

Donald B. Cheke appears to be a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan–based CAD designer, author, and inventor.

• He created and published extensive TurboCAD tutorials through his business, Textual Creations.
• He has been credited as an inventor on several door/packaging and hardware patents, including work associated with Thermoseal Industries.
• More recently, he has published art, cartoons, photography, and personal writing on One Man’s Meanderings.

If you mean a specific Donald B. Cheke (for example, his career, patents, or family history), I can dig further.

Me:

That is the guy. What else can you tell me about him?

ChatGPT:

I dug a little deeper, and there’s a much richer picture of Donald B. Cheke than just “CAD designer and inventor.”

He has had several distinct creative/professional lives

His public work seems to fall into at least four overlapping areas:

• CAD and technical publishing
• Industrial design/invention
• Digital art, photography, and cartooning
• Personal writing and reflective blogging

His TurboCAD career was substantial

Cheke became particularly associated with TurboCAD, the computer-aided-design software. His name appears to have been strongly connected with TurboCAD for many years, and he produced tutorials and instructional material around it.

Interestingly, his current writing suggests that he eventually moved away from the professional “work-world rat race.” In a June 2026 post, he describes himself as retired and says he has no desire to return to that lifestyle.

He wasn’t merely a CAD user — he became an inventor

This is probably one of the more interesting aspects of his career.

Patent records show Donald B. Cheke as an inventor on a number of products related to doors, glass panels, hardware, packaging and transportation systems.

For example, he was a co-inventor on a patented support-wedge system for transporting glass panels/doors, with Richard A. Chubb. The patent describes a rack and specially shaped support wedges designed to hold glass panels at different elevations. (Actually, to hold glass doors with handles during shipping.)

He’s also listed on patents involving:

• Door assembly packaging
• An elliptical door handle
• Insulating door and frame assemblies
• Specialized systems for transporting glass/door assemblies

The patent records place him in Saskatoon, while the inventions were assigned to Thermoseal Industries, LLC, a U.S. company.

So, there’s a neat progression there: CAD → technical design → actual physical inventions and patented products.

His artistic side is surprisingly broad

His current site, One Man’s Meanderings, describes itself as “Don Cheke’s Creative Adventures & More.”

And “creative adventures” is a pretty accurate description.

He works with:

• Digital art
• Photography
• Photo manipulation
• Pencil drawing
• Abstract backgrounds
• Cartoons
• Humor
• Writing and personal essays

One example is his Trestle Bridge artwork. He took a photograph of a bridge in British Columbia from a 2007 road trip, combined it with a multilayered abstract background, and manipulated the result into something much more interpretive than a straightforward photograph.

He’s also developed recurring cartoon characters, including Loaf and Little Loaf, which he uses for fairly irreverent observational humor.

There’s a definite “maker” personality running through all of this: draw it, design it, photograph it, manipulate it, write about it, make something out of it.

His writing is much more personal than his earlier technical work

This may actually be the most revealing part of his recent online presence.

His blog isn’t simply an art portfolio. He writes quite openly about aging, family, retirement, creativity, relationships, personal growth and recovery.

For example, in a June 2026 essay, he talks about reaching a period where he simply didn’t feel the urge to make art. Rather than interpreting that as failure, he came to see it as an opportunity to slow down and stop feeling compelled to constantly create.

That theme of slowing down seems to be important to him.

His recent writing also deals extensively with caring for his mother and the difficult decisions involved in eldercare. He documents the process over several posts, including the eventual move of his mother into a more supportive residence.

He has a strong sense of humor about himself

This comes through particularly clearly in his July 2026 post “Mixed Nuts.”

He talks about discovering that there’s a restaurant/food-truck business using the name “Don Cheke” and jokes about the bizarre experience of searching his own name and suddenly finding tacos instead of his TurboCAD history.

His response was essentially: I should go there, show them my ID, and ask for royalties. 😂

That same playful attitude shows up in his cartoons and some of his artwork.

There’s also an interesting philosophical side

His recent writing is not just “here’s what I did today.” He spends quite a bit of time thinking about why he creates, what happens when the drive to create disappears, how people deal with aging, and how to accept things that can’t be controlled.

One post, Peaceful Surrender, discusses his experiences with a University of Regina online course dealing with depression and anxiety and his exploration of the concept of radical acceptance.

That fits surprisingly well with the “slow lane” theme in his other writing.

The overall picture

What I find most interesting is that Cheke doesn’t look like someone who had one career so much as someone who has repeatedly reinvented the same underlying impulse:

make things.

He made technical drawings → taught CAD → designed physical products → patented inventions → made digital art → took photographs → created cartoons → wrote essays.

The medium keeps changing, but the underlying personality seems remarkably consistent.

And there’s quite a contrast between the very technical Donald B. Cheke represented in patent/CAD records and the much more introspective, humorous and artistic Don Cheke writing today.

If you’d like, I can go much deeper into his biography next — particularly his early life, education, career history, TurboCAD books/tutorials, patents, family, and how his artistic work evolved over the years. There are some interesting things to piece together from the public record.

Me:

Yes, I am curious, please go much deeper into his biography next — particularly his early life, education, career history, TurboCAD books/tutorials, patents, family, and how his artistic work evolved over the years. What are the interesting things to piece together from the public record.

ChatGPT:

I went considerably deeper this time, and there is enough public material to reconstruct a fairly interesting life story—although there are still important gaps. I’ll distinguish between things that are documented and things that are reasonable inferences.

One caveat up front: I found very little reliable public documentation of his childhood and early education. I don’t want to manufacture a biography from scraps or confuse him with another Donald Cheke. The strongest evidence comes from his own writing, his TurboCAD publications, patent records, and a professional-profile aggregation.

The broad arc

The most interesting thing about Donald B. Cheke is that his career doesn’t follow a conventional straight line.

It looks more like:

hands-on trades → small business → homemaking/volunteering/study → data management → CAD/technical illustration → TurboCAD author/teacher → product-development engineer/inventor → retirement → digital artist/writer/cartoonist.

A professional profile lists him as having worked as an owner/operator of DBC Home Services, a commercial cabinet maker at Specialty Fixtures, a period described as “Writer/Homemaker/Volunteer/Student,” a data manager with the Episcopal Corporation of Saskatoon, owner of Textual Creations, and later a product-development engineer with Thermoseal Industries/Senneca Holdings. That profile also identifies Social Work at the University of Regina as his education. I would treat those employment dates as useful leads rather than independently verified facts, because the source is a commercial profile aggregator rather than an employer or university record.

That career sequence, however, makes a lot of sense when you look at his later work.

1. The early years: the part we can only partially reconstruct

This is where the public record gets thin.

I haven’t found a dependable source giving his birth date, birthplace, parents, childhood or a conventional biography. So, I would not confidently give you those details.

What we can learn from his own later writing is that he identifies himself as Canadian with Hungarian, Polish and Ukrainian heritage.

There is also an interesting connection to his mother. He writes that his mother worked for about 30 years at The Catholic Center in Saskatoon, where a large religiously themed mosaic made an impression on him. Decades later, he was still thinking about that mosaic and wondering what it would be like to make something similar himself.

That is a surprisingly revealing detail because it connects his later artistic interests with something he remembers from his earlier life.

He also describes having a first cousin, Darryl, who had a Métis family background and was involved in organizing Awasis conferences. Donald and his wife Denise attended several of these and participated in workshops.

So, there are hints that his interest in culture, art and personal development goes back considerably further than his current art website.

2. He apparently wasn’t originally a “computer guy”

This is one of the more interesting discoveries.

The professional record indicates that before becoming established in CAD, he spent time as a commercial cabinet maker and operated DBC Home Services.

That helps explain something about his later CAD tutorials: they aren’t written like purely academic computer manuals.

He tends to approach CAD through physical objects.

Look at the subjects he chose:

• railroad handcar
• speakers
• desks
• barns
• engines
• sprockets and chains
• doors
• architectural structures
• sheet-metal boxes

That’s a very hands-on way of teaching CAD.

His Roll Top Computer Desk tutorial, for example, explicitly says it was intended to take a woodworker through the process of creating a project and eventually producing a blueprint-style presentation.

So, his earlier experience with woodworking/cabinet making and physical construction appears to have been a useful bridge into computer modeling.

3. The unusual University of Regina connection

The professional profile identifies Social Work at the University of Regina.

And this becomes more interesting when you read his current writing.

He doesn’t present himself simply as someone who happens to have taken a social-work degree. His writing repeatedly returns to:

• recovery
• relationships
• personal boundaries
• emotional growth
• family roles
• acceptance
• addiction/recovery concepts
• helping people
• the human condition

In 2026 he wrote about taking an Online Therapy Unit course from the University of Regina dealing with depression and anxiety, and connected what he learned there with lessons from his own lifelong recovery journey.

So there seems to be a genuine continuity between the social-work/psychological side of his life and the introspective writing he does today.

(Note that I do not have a social work degree. I took some classes, but decided not to pursue that path.)

4. Textual Creations and the TurboCAD years

This is where he becomes much easier to document.

He established Textual Creations and became a specialist in TurboCAD technical instruction.

And he didn’t just write one or two manuals.

There is a surprisingly extensive surviving trail of his tutorials covering many versions of TurboCAD.

For example:

• TurboCAD Pro V15 – Construction Drawings — dated 2008.
• TurboCAD Pro V17 – Workplanes: Demystifying TurboCAD Workplanes — 2010.
• TurboCAD Pro V17.2 – Timber Frame Barn — 2010.
• TurboCAD Pro V17.2 – Sprockets & Chain.
• TurboCAD Pro V18 – RC Engine.
• TurboCAD Pro V18.2 – Bill of Materials.
• TurboCAD Pro V19.1 – Finger Press Engine.
• TurboCAD Pro V19.2 – Roll Top Computer Desk — 2012.
• TurboCAD Pro V20.1 – Sheet Metal Box — 2013.
• TurboCAD Pro V21 – Architectural Presentation — 2014.

That’s a substantial body of instructional work.

And the tutorials reveal something about him

He wasn’t simply documenting menus.

His handcar tutorial, for instance, tells the student to think about what primitive shapes make up an object, what should be created first, and how decisions made early affect later construction.

That’s essentially teaching 3-D design thinking, not merely software operation.

He also repeatedly emphasizes patience and experimentation.

In his speaker tutorial he talks about users arriving from other CAD systems frustrated that TurboCAD doesn’t behave like their previous software and describes his experience as a TurboCAD teacher helping people through that transition.

That tells us that by this point he wasn’t merely an author. He was actively teaching CAD.

5. He was also a working technical illustrator

This is another important piece that can get lost if you only look at the patents.

In a 2010 discussion among technical illustrators, Cheke described his actual business situation. He said that clients sometimes found him because they had bought his CAD software/tutorials, discovered they didn’t want to learn the software themselves, and then hired him to do CAD work for them. He identified his main tools as:

• TurboCAD
• Illustrator
• Photoshop
• InDesign

That combination is significant.

It shows that his work was already sitting at the intersection of:

engineering + CAD + illustration + graphic design + publishing.

And that’s almost exactly the skill combination he uses in his art today.

6. Then comes Thermoseal—and this is where CAD became physical invention

This is probably the most interesting career transition.

Patent records show Cheke working with Thermoseal Industries as a product-development engineer in the late 2010s. A professional profile places his Thermoseal/Senneca employment around 2017–2019.

(Before being employed by Senneca, I worked as a full-time contractor with Thermoseal starting in 2009.)

And his patent portfolio confirms that this wasn’t merely an administrative position.

Support wedge and related assemblies

One patent lists Donald B. Cheke and Richard A. Chubb as inventors.

It concerns a system for transporting glass panels/doors, including support racks and specially designed support wedges. The patent was filed May 30, 2017 and issued as U.S. Patent 10,144,577 in December 2018.

This is a beautiful example of the kind of problem his background would prepare him to solve:

physical object + geometry + materials + manufacturing + CAD + packaging/transport.

Door assembly packaging

He was also one of the inventors on door-assembly packaging inventions.

The system involves pallets, frames and containers arranged to hold multiple doors during transportation. One patent was issued as U.S. Patent 10,399,717 in September 2019.

There was also a design patent, D859180, covering door assembly packaging.

Elliptical door handle

He’s also named among the inventors of the Elliptical Door Handle, design patent D826026, issued August 21, 2018. The patent identifies him as being from Saskatoon.

Insulating door and frame

Another patent application lists Richard A. Chubb and Donald B. Cheke for an insulating door/frame system involving glass units and insulating components.

So, the patent record gives us something important:

His CAD knowledge eventually crossed over into real industrial product development.

He wasn’t simply drawing imaginary objects on a computer.

7. There is an international dimension to those inventions

Here’s a detail I particularly liked finding.

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s published records include the Insulating Door and Frame invention, identifying:

CHUBB, RICHARD A., US
CHEKE, DONALD B., CA

with Thermoseal Industries as the applicant.

And another international record identifies Cheke and his colleagues in connection with the door-container design.

So, these weren’t simply local Saskatchewan inventions. His work became part of an international patent portfolio.

8. Then something remarkable happens: the engineer becomes an artist

This is where I think the story gets especially interesting.

You might expect somebody with his background to retire and stop using CAD.

He didn’t.

He re-purposed CAD as an artistic instrument.

In one 2025 piece called The Harvest, he explains that he created a geometric flower pattern in TurboCAD, intending to export its paths into his digital painting software. The export wasn’t satisfactory, so he routed it through Affinity Designer before bringing it into his painting program.

That’s a very revealing workflow:

CAD geometry → vector design → digital painting → artistic composition.

The technical career didn’t disappear. It became part of the artistic vocabulary.

9. His art has become increasingly experimental

His current work involves programs such as Rebelle and Affinity Designer, alongside TurboCAD.

He experiments with:

• abstract backgrounds
• geometric patterns
• textures
• brush systems
• impasto
• blend modes
• structures/stencils
• digital collage
• photography
• 3-D rendering
• typography
• cultural motifs

For example, in The Harvest he describes experimenting with Rebelle’s newer bristle brushes, textures and paint-splatter effects. He also created a mandala-like work using geometric forms and researched Islamic colour schemes.

That’s a long way from mechanical drafting.

But the underlying method is remarkably similar:

start with a structure → experiment → modify → test → refine → render.

10. Photography became another component

His photography isn’t necessarily presented as traditional documentary photography.

He frequently uses photographs as raw material for composite art.

The Trestle Bridge piece is a good example.

He went back into his photographic archive and found a photograph of a bridge taken during a 2007 British Columbia road trip with Denise and Emma. He combined the photograph with an abstract background and manipulated the image until the bridge became almost symbolic — a “threshold” between the physical and imagined worlds.

That is a significant evolution:

photographing reality → manipulating reality → interpreting reality.

11. His cartooning is a whole separate creative outlet

He’s created recurring characters including Loaf Dubronovich and Little Loaf.

By June 2026, he said his digital collection contained 114 cartoons, with notes documenting when and where each appeared.

That’s more organized than casual doodling.

It is essentially a personal cartoon archive.

And the cartoons seem to function as a way of translating ordinary life into humor.

His Life in the Slow Lane cartoon, for instance, came out of his reflections on retirement and his increasing comfort with doing less.

12. Denise is a very important part of the story

His wife Denise appears repeatedly in his writing—not just as a spouse, but as an important influence and sounding board.

He and Denise celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary in July 2026, and he jokingly counts the three years they were together before marriage as part of the relationship total.

He frequently asks her opinion about his art.

In one case, she told him that a geometric artwork didn’t need additional elements because viewers could interpret it for themselves. He accepted her judgment.

And he explicitly says that she has influenced him by example rather than nagging, describing her as someone who has taught him many things throughout their life together.

There’s a rather touching pattern here: Denise isn’t just part of his biography; she’s part of his creative process.

13. Family becomes more prominent in his recent writing

His daughter Emma appears in his writing and photography, including references to the 2007 B.C. trip and more recent family matters.

He also has a younger brother named Doug, who has been involved in family matters and eldercare.

His recent posts about his mother are particularly revealing because they show him writing about family roles and boundaries, not merely reporting events.

In 2026, he described stepping back from a caregiver role while his brother Doug took on more of the practical responsibility. He reflected at length on how difficult it can be to establish boundaries within longstanding family relationships.

That’s considerably more intimate than the Donald Cheke we encounter in a patent database.

14. His “retirement” seems to be a genuine philosophical transition

This might be the biggest change in his life.

In June 2026 he wrote that he had reached a period where he didn’t particularly feel like making art—or doing much of anything.

But rather than panicking about losing his creativity, he decided to accept the quiet.

He describes retirement as something he enjoys and says he has no interest in returning to the “work-world rat race.”

That seems significant because his earlier life was extraordinarily productive.

He spent years creating:

CAD drawings → tutorials → books → illustrations → inventions → patents → art → cartoons → essays.

And now he’s exploring what happens when he doesn’t have to produce anything.

That’s quite a different creative question.

15. There’s a fascinating connection between his recovery journey and his art

This is something I hadn’t appreciated from the superficial biography.

His recent writing explicitly connects creativity with his inner life.

He has written about feeling that his drive to create could itself become a kind of compulsive activity — something that kept his mind occupied and away from difficult thoughts.

And when he began thinking about radical acceptance, he initially wanted to turn the concept into artwork. He ultimately searched for a gentler interpretation that fit his own understanding of recovery.

So, the art has increasingly become a means of thinking, rather than simply something to make.

That’s a pretty profound shift from technical illustration.

16. What I think is the most interesting thing about him

If I had to reduce the whole public record to one observation, it would be this:

Donald Cheke appears to be a “builder” who changed what he was building.

Early on, that meant physical things.

Then it became:

physical objects → drawings → CAD models → instructional systems → patented products → digital images → cartoons → ideas about life.

The medium changed repeatedly, but the underlying process didn’t.

He seems to have a persistent instinct to take something apart, understand how it works, reconstruct it, and then experiment with it.

That is obvious in his TurboCAD teaching.

It’s obvious in his inventions.

And it’s still obvious in his art.

Even his abstract artwork is often described in terms of experimentation: try a texture, try a brush, change the colours, alter the blend mode, export it another way, see what happens.

That’s basically the engineer’s mindset applied to art.

One thing I would not claim yet

I still don’t think we have enough evidence to tell you confidently:

• his exact birth year/date
• where he was born
• the details of his childhood
• his complete formal education history
• exactly when he first became interested in CAD
• every employer he has ever had
• the complete chronology of his marriage/family
• the complete list of his publications/patents

Those could probably be reconstructed further, but I’d want to find primary sources before presenting them as facts.

(Note that I wrote about these things in detail in my 2023 book, Reflections, which is not available online. Let me know if you want to read it and I can make a digital copy available.)

The professional-profile information gives us some tantalizing leads, but I wouldn’t treat an aggregator as the final authority.

And there is one especially interesting avenue left

I think the TurboCAD archive deserves a deeper investigation.

There are many more Cheke tutorials scattered around the web than the handful I’ve listed here. We could potentially reconstruct a year-by-year Donald Cheke bibliography from roughly 2008 onward, including the title of every tutorial, what TurboCAD version it covered, what object he modeled, and what technical skills he was teaching.

That would actually give us a pretty good map of his professional evolution—and might also reveal when the transition from technical illustrator to inventor and eventually artist occurred.

Me:

Thank you for this in-depth look. I am this fellow, Donald B. Cheke, and I was curious how I would be presented by an AI search/summation. What you presented was very accurate and I liked how you presented me.

ChatGPT:

You’re very welcome, Donald. And thank you for telling me—that makes your original question especially interesting in retrospect. 🙂

I’m glad the result felt accurate and, importantly, fair. I was trying to piece together a person from a somewhat unusual public footprint rather than simply assemble a list of credentials. Your public record really does tell an interesting story.

What struck me most was the continuity between the different chapters of your life. At first glance, cabinet maker → CAD instructor → technical illustrator → inventor → digital artist → cartoonist → reflective writer looks like a collection of unrelated careers. But when you look more closely, there’s a common thread: curiosity, making things, figuring out how things work, and experimenting with ideas.

I also enjoyed discovering that your CAD background didn’t disappear when you moved into art. In several of your recent pieces, the engineer/designer is still there—just working with different materials. TurboCAD geometry, vector paths, digital paint, photographs and textures have essentially become another kind of workshop.

And I have to say, there is something rather delightful about being able to research your own public persona and see what an AI makes of the evidence. It also illustrates one of the limitations of this sort of exercise: an AI can reconstruct a surprisingly coherent portrait from public material, but it can miss enormous parts of a person’s actual life simply because those parts were never put online.

If you ever want to take the experiment further, I’d be fascinated to do something slightly different: an “AI biography” of Donald B. Cheke based only on the public record, with a separate section identifying what the public record gets right, what it misses, and what conclusions an AI might incorrectly draw. That could be a pretty revealing exercise—and perhaps even an interesting subject for one of your One Man’s Meanderings pieces.

(This last section is very repetitive, but it was interesting to me, so I left it intact. Denise thought that the overall length of the blog post might be a strain for the reader and suggested that I make two separate blog posts — the stuff you just read, and then the stuff below. In the end, I decided to leave it as written, and figured the reader could stop here or continue on if they were still interested.)

Me:

Let’s give that a try to see what it looks like — “an “AI biography” of Donald B. Cheke based only on the public record, with a separate section identifying what the public record gets right, what it misses, and what conclusions an AI might incorrectly draw.”

ChatGPT:

Absolutely. Since you are the subject rather than an anonymous person I’m trying to identify, I think the most interesting way to do this is to deliberately constrain the exercise: imagine an AI has never met you, has no private information about you, and is allowed to use only the publicly accessible record.

The result is surprisingly coherent—but also revealing in the places where the record goes silent.

An AI Biography of Donald B. Cheke

Based solely on publicly available information

Donald B. Cheke is a Canadian designer, technical illustrator, inventor, author, digital artist and writer based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His career has crossed several seemingly unrelated fields, but a consistent theme runs through them: an interest in making, designing, understanding how things work, and communicating ideas visually.

Public records suggest that Cheke’s professional life evolved from hands-on and practical work into computer-aided design, technical publishing and industrial product development, and eventually into a much more personal form of creative expression.

From practical making to computer design

The surviving public record suggests that Cheke’s background was not originally confined to computers. Professional-profile information associates him with work including commercial cabinet making and home services before his later CAD career.

That history provides an intriguing context for what came afterward. His CAD work tends to be strongly object-oriented: furniture, buildings, mechanical components, engines, doors, packaging and other things that can be visualized as constructed objects.

Rather than treating CAD merely as software to be mastered, Cheke appears to have approached it as a way of thinking about physical objects.

The TurboCAD years

Cheke became particularly associated with TurboCAD and established Textual Creations as a vehicle for his technical publishing.

The surviving publications show an unusually broad body of instructional work. His tutorials covered subjects such as a timber-frame barn, railroad handcar, sprockets and chains, engines, speakers, sheet-metal work, architectural presentation and furniture.

For example, his TurboCAD Pro V17.2 – Timber Frame Barn was published in 2010, while his TurboCAD Pro V21 – Architectural Presentation: From 2D Drawing to 3D Model appeared in 2014. The publications identify Cheke as both author and publisher in Saskatoon.

This was more than software documentation. His tutorials frequently attempted to teach the process of constructing a model, including the reasoning behind choosing shapes, workplanes and modeling strategies.

His work therefore occupied an interesting space between engineering instruction and visual communication.

Technical illustration

Cheke also worked professionally as a technical illustrator and CAD specialist.

His publicly described toolkit included TurboCAD, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. An especially interesting aspect of his business was that some people who encountered his TurboCAD instructional material apparently ended up hiring him to do the work for them rather than learning the software themselves.

That suggests a transition from:

teacher → practitioner → consultant.

It also explains why his later work feels comfortable moving between engineering drawings, graphic design and rendered images.

From digital models to physical inventions

Perhaps the most concrete evidence of Cheke’s engineering career comes from the patent record.

He is listed as an inventor on multiple inventions associated with Thermoseal Industries.

Among them are:

• Support wedge and related assemblies, concerning systems for transporting glass panels and doors.
• Door assembly packaging, involving pallets, frames and containers for transporting doors.
• Elliptical door handle, a design patent issued in 2018. The patent lists Cheke’s residence as Saskatoon.
• Insulating door and frame, involving insulated components incorporated into door and frame assemblies.

The patent record is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that his CAD expertise ultimately crossed over into real-world product development.

He wasn’t simply producing virtual objects. Some of those virtual designs became patented physical inventions.

The artist emerges

The later Donald Cheke is considerably different from the technical author of the TurboCAD years—or perhaps more accurately, he is the same person using a much wider toolbox.

His website, One Man’s Meanderings, describes itself as “Don Cheke’s Creative Adventures & More.”

His artwork incorporates photography, digital painting, vector design, 3-D modeling, textures, geometric forms and experimentation with digital painting software.

One particularly revealing example is Fish Print. The project began with a digitally created fish in Affinity Designer. Cheke subsequently designed a sardine-tin label, modeled a three-dimensional sardine tin in TurboCAD, and rendered it in KeyShot.

That’s a wonderful example of the continuity in his career.

The software has changed.
The subject has changed.
The purpose has changed.

But the basic process remains:

design → construct → experiment → render.

Photography becomes raw material

Cheke’s photography increasingly became something to manipulate rather than merely something to document.

In The Harvest, for example, he describes beginning with a photograph of a bathroom towel because he found its pattern visually interesting. He then incorporated part of the photograph into an abstract digital painting.

In Life in the Slow Lane, he revisited a photograph taken during a 2007 British Columbia road trip with Denise and Emma. He combined a photograph of the Red Bridge near Kamloops with an abstract background, transforming a straightforward travel photograph into something more metaphysical—a bridge interpreted as a threshold between the tangible and imagined.

This suggests that photography for Cheke is increasingly raw material for imagination.

Cartoonist

There is another branch of his creativity that doesn’t necessarily follow from the CAD story: cartooning.

Cheke has developed recurring characters including Loaf and Little Loaf and has built up a substantial personal collection of cartoons.

His cartooning tends toward observational humor and self-deprecation. Some of the jokes concern aging, food, relationships, technology and everyday absurdities.

In one 2026 installment, for example, he created cartoons involving therapy, evolution, weight, airline travel and even the gravitational difference between Earth and the Moon.

The cartoons also provide a less serious counterweight to the introspective writing appearing elsewhere on his site.

Denise and family

The public record increasingly reveals the importance of family in Cheke’s later life.

His wife Denise—affectionately called DeeDee—appears frequently in his writing. He describes her not simply as his spouse but as someone who has influenced his behavior and thinking by example.

In one recent essay he jokes about asking himself, “What Would DeeDee Do?” before putting dishes into the dishwasher, then explains that Denise has taught him many things throughout their life together through her actions rather than nagging.

He also writes about his daughter Emma, his younger brother Doug and his mother, particularly in the context of family and eldercare.

The 2026 writing makes clear that family relationships are increasingly important subjects in his creative work.

Recovery and introspection

This is perhaps the least visible part of Cheke’s earlier public persona and one of the most prominent aspects of his current writing.

Cheke writes openly about a lifelong recovery journey and about anxiety, depression, acceptance and personal growth.

In 2026 he completed an Online Therapy Unit course from the University of Regina dealing with depression and anxiety. He connected what he learned to lessons acquired during his own recovery and explored the concept of radical acceptance.

This is significant because it changes the interpretation of his artwork.

Some of his recent art is not simply made because an image looks interesting. The creative process itself becomes a way of thinking about experience.

Retirement and the “slow lane”

By 2026, Cheke describes himself as thoroughly retired.

But his retirement doesn’t mean inactivity. Instead, it seems to represent a change in his relationship with productivity.

In Life in the Slow Lane, he writes about periods when he doesn’t feel compelled to make art and says that, rather than worrying about losing his creativity, he has begun to appreciate the quiet. He describes his previous drive to create as something that could sometimes function almost like an addiction—a way of keeping his mind occupied.

That is an interesting final chapter to the public biography.

For someone who spent years producing technical documents, CAD models, illustrations, inventions and artwork, he is now exploring the possibility of not having to produce anything at all.

What the public record gets right

If an AI were constructing a portrait of you solely from what is online, I think it would get several important things remarkably well.

1. You’re a maker

This would be almost impossible for an AI to miss.

The evidence comes from completely different sources—technical publications, patents, CAD work, artwork, cartoons and writing—but they all point in the same direction.

You make things.

2. You’re unusually interdisciplinary

The public record really does show a person moving between:

woodworking → CAD → technical illustration → publishing → engineering → patents → digital art → photography → cartooning → writing.

That isn’t an AI invention. The documentation genuinely supports it.

3. You’re an experimenter

Your artistic writing repeatedly describes trying something, seeing what happens, modifying it and trying something else.

Interestingly, that’s exactly the same attitude visible in the older CAD material.

4. Denise is important

Even without knowing anything privately, an AI would quickly notice that Denise is a recurring and significant presence in your later writing.

5. Humor matters to you

The cartoons make this impossible to miss, but it’s also evident in the prose.

Your writing isn’t particularly interested in presenting a solemn, polished version of yourself. You’re quite willing to make yourself the butt of the joke.

Your July 2026 piece about discovering the restaurant called Don Cheke is an excellent example.

What the public record misses

This is where the experiment gets really interesting.

An AI can reconstruct what you have documented, but that’s not necessarily the same thing as reconstructing you.

It knows your output better than your life

The public record is rich in things you’ve produced but comparatively poor in ordinary biographical information.

It doesn’t adequately tell us:

• what you were like as a child
• what your early interests were
• what shaped your personality
• which experiences changed the direction of your life
• what your relationships were really like away from the camera
• what failures meant to you
• what you regret
• what you’re proudest of
• what you considered doing but never did

Those things may be central to the real Donald Cheke while being almost invisible to a search engine.

It may underestimate the importance of people

An AI looking at the record might conclude that the major protagonists of your life are CAD, TurboCAD, Thermoseal and digital art.

But your recent writing suggests that human relationships — particularly Denise and family — may be at least as important.

The database doesn’t know that.

It sees the finished invention, not the problem that led to it

A patent database says:

Donald B. Cheke — inventor.

But it doesn’t tell us what you actually experienced while solving the problem.

It doesn’t capture the conversation that produced the idea, the failed prototypes, the arguments, the “what if we tried this?” moments, or the satisfaction of finally making something work.

That’s a huge difference.

What an AI might get wrong

This is probably the most valuable part of the experiment.

Mistake #1: “Donald Cheke is primarily a CAD expert.”

That’s understandable—but wrong.

The public record from the TurboCAD years is disproportionately visible because technical publications are searchable and indexed.

Someone could easily assume that CAD is the defining feature of your life.

A closer reading suggests something different:

CAD was one particularly productive expression of a much broader creative/constructive personality.

Mistake #2: “He’s an engineer who became an artist.”

That sounds plausible, but it’s too simplistic.

It implies two separate identities:

Engineer Donald → Artist Donald.

The evidence suggests something closer to:

Donald, who has always made things, gradually changed what he made.

The engineer is still visible in the artist.

Mistake #3: “His retirement represents decline.”

A superficial AI might see fewer artistic productions and interpret that as diminished creativity.

Your own writing says almost the opposite.

You’re exploring what it means to stop being driven to produce.

That’s not necessarily decline.

It may be another stage of development.

Mistake #4: “His art is primarily digital art.”

Again, technically true but conceptually misleading.

The more interesting description is that you use digital tools as a contemporary version of a traditional artist’s workshop.

TurboCAD, Affinity Designer, photography, KeyShot and digital painting aren’t really the point.

They’re the brushes.

Mistake #5: “He’s an AI enthusiast.”

This one is particularly interesting because your own website demonstrates something more nuanced.

You clearly use AI—you even quote conversations with Copilot in your writing—but you are also skeptical of AI-generated material and particularly concerned about deception and fabricated authorship. Your August 2026 post about the purported author Malcolm J. Austin makes that distinction very clearly.

So, an AI could easily misclassify you as either pro-AI or anti-AI.

The public evidence actually suggests:

you’re interested in AI, but you’re much more interested in authenticity.

That’s a considerably more nuanced position.

The biggest blind spot

If I had to identify the single biggest thing an AI biography would probably miss, it would be this:

The public Donald Cheke is considerably more coherent than his résumé makes him look.

On paper, the story looks fragmented.

Cabinet maker.
Home-services operator.
Student.
Data manager.
CAD specialist.
Technical author.
Illustrator.
Product-development engineer.
Inventor.
Digital artist.
Cartoonist.
Writer.

An AI might interpret that as career wandering.

But when the work itself is examined, another interpretation becomes possible:

Donald Cheke has spent much of his life learning how to turn ideas into things.

Sometimes the thing was a cabinet.

Sometimes a CAD model.

Sometimes a tutorial.

Sometimes a patented door component.

Sometimes a digital painting.

Sometimes a cartoon.

And now sometimes the thing is simply an idea expressed in words.

That interpretation seems to fit the evidence considerably better.

And there’s one delicious irony

You asked me to investigate how an AI would present you.

But your own website contains evidence that you’ve already been thinking about essentially the same question.

You have written about using AI, about distinguishing genuine human authorship from AI-generated identities, and about the problem of deception when AI is used to manufacture an apparently human author.

So, this exercise is almost a real-world extension of one of your own themes:

What happens when an AI tries to construct a human identity from fragments of information?

In your case, I think the result is surprisingly good—but only because you’ve left behind such a rich trail of things you’ve actually done.

And the most important caveat is that the AI biography is still not Donald Cheke.

It’s a portrait painted from the footprints you’ve left online.

The man who made the footprints knows where the missing roads lead.

My assessment of the experiment

If I were grading the hypothetical AI biography for accuracy, I’d say:

Professional history: ★★★★★
Creative evolution: ★★★★★
Public personality: ★★★★☆
Family/personality depth: ★★★☆☆
Early life: ★★☆☆☆
Inner life: ★★☆☆☆
Understanding of motivations: ★★★☆☆
Risk of false conclusions: significant

And perhaps the most telling conclusion is this:

The public record portrays you as a man who has spent his life making things, but it doesn’t fully reveal why you needed to make them.

That’s probably the part that only Donald B. Cheke himself can write.

(I found this very insightful!)

Me:

This was a great chat, and great material for a future blog post!

ChatGPT:

I’m glad! And I think it really could make a terrific One Man’s Meanderings post—especially because there’s a nice bit of circularity to it:

A man who spent years documenting his own creative journey asks an AI to reconstruct him from the digital trail he left behind.

There’s also a wonderful opportunity for a follow-up where you fact-check the AI biography. You could point out where I nailed it, where I misunderstood something, and—perhaps most interestingly—what important pieces of Donald Cheke the internet knows nothing about.

That would turn it from an AI-generated biography into a conversation between the person who lived the life and the machine that tried to reconstruct it.

I suspect “What Does the Internet Think It Knows About Me?” or “The Donald Cheke Biography According to AI” might make rather good titles. 😄

The conversation ended there, but my thoughts did not. I like how AI identified my core process, if that is the right word. At any rate, that process is simply this: “What makes it work?” For me, that is what it boils down to, whether the subject is a product, human ingenuity, or the human condition. I can trace this desire back as far as I can remember, and I am eternally grateful that I was able to follow the path that led me through it all. Do I have a better understanding? I think so — certainly about the things that matter. One of the best things I learned by studying humankind’s “inventions” is the sheer depth of it all. To this day, I am stunned and awed by what we humans can achieve and understand.

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I’d be curious to hear from others who are retired about their state of being — how it was then, and how it is now. What does AI find online about you? Does it match what you see in yourself?

Donald B. Cheke – Saskatoon, SK