1. Interests

1.1. Water Skiing

One foot

Me in a turn

During summer I like to go water skiing on our local lake. The concept is fairly straight-forward: You find a powerful boat, attach a rope out behind it, and then bravely cling on to the other end of the rope. When the boat goes forward, the idea is that you follow behind, standing on a strip of timber on top of the water, and still gripping onto the end of the rope. Nice theory.. It can be a bit more awkward in practice.

Imagine a clear, windless Saturday morning at about 7am. The water is flat, with perhaps only light ripples on the surface and the images of fish on the underside. The air is crisp and the only sound is the rushing of wind in your ears, and the faint burble of the boat at the other end of the line. You come out of a clean turn, and feel the acceleration and power in in the line, before hitting the wake --- with your face.

But then, falling off is all part of the experience, and it's fortunate that water's reasonably soft.

The Ski Boat

The Ski-Boat

The ski boat came before the skiing. We bought the current boat as a bare, vandalised 18ft racing hull. After some work with the fibreglass, we now have an extended cockpit ski-race boat. While I'd hardly call myself an expert fibreglass fabricator, I learnt a fair bit from the job.

Part of the plan was to put a gearbox in the drive-train, to increase pull-out torque without compromising the top speed and fuel efficiency. It has a rear-mount 351 Ford driving through a 3-speed automatic transmission and a V-drive. The transmission is a standard automotive unit, except with a locked up torque converter to improve efficiency and reduce heat loading. It works quite well, and the gear-changes are quite smooth. In second gear, there is plenty of power to spare when pulling up two skiers. We haven't tried three yet..

1.2. Sailing

The Sail Boat

I own an NS14 sail boat, which I take out onto the lake in the warmer months. Somehow getting out there in the middle of winter in a roaring southerly doesn't quite appeal to me. I don't claim to be an expert sailor, but it's a great challenge and a rewarding experience. Sailing has a quite pure feel to it, in trying to utilise the forces of nature.

The photo shown is of my boat, taken on a rather calm evening. The wind had dropped on that afternoon and it had been a rather slow trip home. That's the trick with sailing: not too much wind, but not too little either.

1.3. Photography

Hawkesbury River

Butterfly

I'm by no means a professional photographer, but I dabble a bit in trying to express an artistic side. (Yes, my artistic side, not photography's artistc side.. there's a difference).

So far I've had some of my better success with macro, and trying to capture the land/water interface, but I'm slowly trying to diversify my abilities. These couple of photos shown here are some of my more pleasing results.

1.4. Activity

Bike at the beach.

There's a number of other activities that keep me feeling alive, active and healthy. One of them is doing some cycling. On road, or off road (but not generally on the beach..). it's a good way of getting around and getting some exercise at the same time. It's certainly a good tiredness-reducing and thinking-enhancing measure.

But then, the gym is good for that too, and I make use of it - though I still can't understand why people would drive to a gym to walk on a treadmill.. It's kind of like walking somewhere to use a driving simulator! Oh wait, people do that too. As I look at that beach picture too, I think, yes it is nice to go to the beach to have a bit of a swim and try to catch some waves.

1.5. Building Things

Sailplane

Boys young and old seem to like building toys. When I was in primary school, I managed to get hold of some radio-control gear, and since that time I built a number of model "things". This included a few boats, a hovercraft, and the plane shown.

I largely finished doing this sort of thing when I was about 12 years old, but in recent times I thought I would try my hand at the sailplane, mainly for the satisfaction of building it. This is not something I have spent much time on in recent years.

I used to play around a lot with electronic circuits, but I haven't done as much with it since it became part of my job. I started off with analog circuits, but then grew into digital and microprocessor circuits.

EPROM programmer and 8088 circuit

My greatest achievements were an 8088 microprocessor system which could be programmed via the parallel port of a PC, and an EPROM programmer which plugged into an ISA bus. In these two cases, I designed and etched the PCBs myself. In the image shown, the programmer is on the left, and the 8088 board on the right. The programmer was a bit tricky, as I only had rudimentary equipment, which made double-sided boards tricky. In fact, I even wrote the software I used to design the PCB. I always tried to do it on the cheap, and used salvaged components wherever possible. I sourced things like wires, connectors, switches, capacitors and other components from scrapped video recorders.

When I think about it, undergraduate life must be pretty easy really, as I did most of that in my spare time as a first year undergrad.

1.6. Computing

My life with computers started in 1986 when our primary school acquired some Microbee computers. These things were amazing, they had 16k of RAM and one even had a floppy disk drive. Once I learned my second BASIC program: a 3-line FOR loop, I was hooked. By the end of that year, I knew Microbee BASIC backwards, and was writing improved versions of some games I had seen.

The next stage was with the IBM PC type computers. I found I had reached the limit with BASIC, and my next exploration was with assembly language. Later I taught myself Pascal, and used that for some software I wrote for my High School. Then in 1992, I became a C++ addict. I bought the compiler in January, then taught myself the language. In about March, I used C++ in a selection contest for an international olympiad, and came first in the country. I think they were impressed by some clever use I made of objects. In '93 I bought a second-hand 80386, and this opened up a new world. I remember playing with protected mode, and task switching. At about the same time, I coded up a fixed-point FFT routine in 386 assembly language. The interesting thing is that I ended up using that routine in my honours project in '96, and then ported it to Linux in '99.

My latest transition has been to become a Linux user. Once I started working in the university environment, with networked PC's and Unix boxes, it became a logical progression. Its networking capability, the ability to remotly log in, X, configurable window managers and a decent command shell are all handy features. I'd like to get into a project developing a GTK based application, but I know I can't afford the time at the moment.

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