Hobbies and Such

When I get some spare time, I'm usually in front of my computer or tinkering with electronics.

My current computer system is built around an AMD FX 8350 8-core processor, on an Asus M5A99X EVO R2.0 motherboard with 16 GB of RAM. I've got around seven Terabytes of hard disk storage. My installed graphics card is an NVidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super PCIe. My monitor is an Acer AL2223W 22-inch wide angle flat panel that I run at 1920x1080 resolution.

In the past several years, I've renewed my interest in photography. I still have 2 Canon 35mm cameras which I had when in the Navy (a TLb and a black body FTb), and a Bronica medium-format (uses 120 film). I've gotten into digital photography with a Nikon D750. I have several lenses, and recently purchased a 70-200 f/2.8 for photographing my grandson's hockey. I have a lot of my photos posted on my Flickr page at John's Flickr page.

I'm a mostly self-taught programmer, having only one semester of any formal programming training. That was for an 'Introduction to Engineering Computing Fundamentals' class and the language of choice was Fortran (input via punched cards).

My first interest in programming came while I was still in the Navy. I had a Texas Instruments programmable calculator, and I was fascinated with all of the 'trick' things you could do with it. After the Navy, I purchased a Sinclair computer kit, what was later to become the Timex/Sinclair computer. It was a puny, underpowered thing, but I spent many hours with it, sitting in front of the television, punching those miserable, undersized membrane keys. While working for Informatics, I had plenty of time to play with the 'new' IBM PC and its variant of BASIC.

After PC-BASIC, I moved into 'Power BASIC', a version of BASIC which produced stand-alone executable programs, and supported more program 'structure'. I dabbled in PASCAL just a bit, but a check of a few programming magazines convinced me that I should learn C. I purchased Turbo C 1.5, and have been using Borland's C and C++ products since that time. I consider myself fairly proficient in C programming, and probably average with C++, although I'm working on it. Probably my C++ has suffered some since I started programming with Delphi, Borland's outstanding programming tool, based on Object Pascal (yes, back to Pascal). I find it easier to program than Borland's equivalent C++ product.

I'm currently working on some microcontroller projects, using the Parallax P8X32A (Propeller) chip, although I have dabbled with some AVR and BASIC Stamp stuff as well.

Some of My Projects