Subject:
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Re: Hobbies....
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.people
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Date:
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Sat, 20 Jan 2001 06:29:48 GMT
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Viewed:
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471 times
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Lets see...
Reading - this is my oldest hobby, interests since high school or so are
Fantasy and Science Fiction. I used to be a regular con attendee until I
moved down here to North Carolina, though I did go to a con which just
started last year and hope to get active again. Other interests include
comics like Asterix and Tintin. If forced to pick a favorite author my
choice would be C. J. Cherryh but other favorites include Raymond Feist,
Janny Wurts, David Brin, Robert Forward, and Hal Clement. Other
interests include science and history, especially archeology.
Model Railroading - this is my 2nd oldest hobby. By college my interests
had narrowed to logging, especially narrow gauge and geared locomotives
(Shay, Heisler, Climax, etc). I've been an HOer all my life (though LEGO
gauge is of course taking over...). I've mostly been an armchair modeler
though I did start on a layout in my apartment, and have boxes of kits.
Role Playing Games and Board Games, also miniatures - Another early one
(well, the board gaming part - I started playing Avalon Hill games
before D&D was published). I haven't been able to do much in the past
few years (too hard to find players), interests run towards fantasy, but
I've done almost everything (and up until the 90s had probably looked at
more than half the game systems out there, no they come out so fast I
don't even pretend to keep up). Current "would like to play/run" games
include Seventh Sea and Deadlands (and Evil Stevies Pirate Game of
course). I've been a rules hacker practically the whole time (I remember
shortly after getting my first game, Tactics II, designing my own game
board, and I hadn't even run D&D the first time before I was ready to
start changing rules [we started with the original blue basic set]).
Programming - in addition to doing this for work, I used to do a lot for
myself, though not so much any more. Favorite language for programming
was Pascal (and later Delphi), but I'm also quite comfortable with
assembler (my first serious programming was teaching myself 6502
assembler with an Apple II and the Apple II Tech Ref, oh, and the Dos
Tech Ref, and my first attempt at a real program was to try and write a
single drive disk copy program [the first Apple II we had at school only
had a single drive, and at that time, the copy program supplied with
Apple Dos 3.2 required 2 drives]). These days I'm quite comfortable with
C and C++. I've in general made a hobby out of programming and have
played with some pretty esoteric languages (BCPL [back in college I
wanted to do some stuff with C having found the source for Small C in
Dr. Dobbs <back when they were a REAL magazine>, but the most
recommended language on the IBM mainframe was BCPL, so I started to try
and translate Small C into BCPL], SNOBOL, Icon, Lisp, Forth, APL [well,
that wasn't much of a hobby language, but it was fun to play with - at
least if you could get on one of the terminals which supported the
character set]). My first programing was in BASIC on an HP 2100A (which
was kind of neat, the computer had a card reader which read cards marked
with #2 pencil and the cards had a single square to mark for each BASIC
statement, then the rest was marked with the same patterns as IBM punch
cards - I've never seen another such convenient programming scheme, I
mean anyone could write programs at home or on the bus, or whatever,
long before laptops were even a dream in someone's mind) and RPN on an
HP 65 calculator (my dad got to borrow all sorts of neat calculators
etc. from work, and I remember as a young kid playing on a Wang
calculator with the nixie tubes, and also playing with a suitcase sized
RPN calculator which had a small CRT to show the stack, I think it might
have been an HP - and at one time I even found a picture of one on the
web). Ok, is that enough geeking for folks (my family is just a geeky
sort of family, my dad was a space physicist, my mom was a
mathematician, my older sister and I both became EEs, my younger sister
is the least geeky of us all but she's an accountant and certainly isn't
afraid of computers, even her husband has been corrupted [he runs a
carpet cleaning business but he buys computer gadgets faster than just
about anyone else in the family])?
Buying and installing (or not installing) computer software and hardware
- I used to buy computer software and hardware so fast that much of it
never got installed (like the CD ROM burner that's been sitting on my
desk for 6 months or so). I've slowed down a lot, but still buy stuff
occasionally.
Electronics - don't do much of this any more, but I still have bits and
pieces lying around.
Music - I was never much of a person for music until I got a CD changer
(my first CD player was a CD ROM - borrowed some CDs from a friend, then
bought a few, then bought a CD changer to play them, then had to get at
least 5 CDs to fill the thing then...). For the first few months I was
spending over $100 per week on music (now my CD collection is something
like 800 CDs or more). Music tastes are pretty wide, but favorites are
Yes (and just about anything by any Yes member or anything similar - my
Yes plus members collection includes close to 150 titles), Celtic
(especially Enya, Clannad, Moire Brennan [i.e. the whole family], Mary
Jane Lammond, and more), organ, ABBA, the Who, and lots more.
Caving - yea, I know my a* from a hole in the ground... For those geeks
out there, it's not spelunking. That's throwing rocks into the mud, or
when idiots who don't know what they're getting into go into a cave with
2 flashlights between them (and the batteries having about 10 seconds of
life left), having descended a 50 foot deep pit by hand over handing
down and old clothesline. We have bumper stickers which claim: "Cavers
rescue spelunkers." I don't end up going much anymore (from here in
Raleigh NC you really need to commit a whole weekend to go caving). I'm
also generally interested in camping and the outdoors.
I'm sure I'm forgetting half a dozen hobbies (oh, I used to collect
coins and stamps).
Frank
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Hobbies....
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| After reading the NetSlaves article in general, I got to thinking about hobbies. It's always interesting to look at a group of people I associate with, over some common cause, and find out what ELSE they do. So, I pose a question: What are some of (...) (24 years ago, 19-Jan-01, to lugnet.people)
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