Allen's Page

Allen's spec on the spot on the web

Last Updated 11/16/2011

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A little about me...

If you care to know how old I am, my birth date begins at the 71541070st digit after the decimal point in PI (in the MMDDYYYY format). If you put enough numbers together anything is possible. In my younger days I live about a year on God's Island, near Ft. DeSoto, without electricity or running water. Having only a kerosene lantern at night really got me into reading. The no-name storm of 1983 rearranged my living situation and I ended up on a houseboat in Hurricane Hole. This was the same time that movie Summer Rental was filming the sailing scene about 100 yards away. It was a great lifestyle until Billy Morning's restaurant went in and brought along caravans of people. These days I live in a average house on an average street with a couple of not so average cats that keep me in line and assist with whatever I'm doing - unless it's their nap time.

My free time is split between house and lawn care, kayaking, photography and tinkering around building things. Occasionally I spend too much time trying to get my money out of Netflix, but that's usually in the evenings. Many of these things have their own pages on my site (except for Netflix). This is likely the most unfocused page on the site. The goal of my web site is to offer information and examples that are not available in other places. This will mean that you will get a taste of whatever I'm up to. I guess that the site as a whole is my Great American Novel.

When the weather permits I spend much of my free time kayaking. It's a wonderful activity that has allowed me to visit places that were previously only accessible on a map. I paddle with friends, local kayaking groups and, often, solo. Most of my paddles are in the 5-10 mile range. My kayaking page has much more information on the subject.

I've been into photography for more than 30 years. I don't know if I'll ever be good at it, but I enjoy attempting to capture the moment, especially with animals and nature. Visit my photography page for some examples of my work.

My woodworking hobby is really a vehicle to get other hobbies where I want them to be. My primary goal with woodworking is to end each day with the same number of fingers that I started with. So far, so good. At some point I realized that it would be possible to construct almost everything needed to enjoy the night sky, including telescope optics, with my own hands. This isn't necessarily less expensive than purchasing commercial equipment, but it had a strange appeal for me. I got my first taste of astronomy while in the Boy Scouts during a summer at Camp Soule. One night Earnie, an Eagle Scout, was pointing out the constellations and that inspired me to work for my Astronomy merit badge. About a year later I was presented the merit badge and, in 1979, I joined Earnie as an Eagle scout.

Outside of astronomy I'm into SCUBA (advanced certifications with NASDS and PADI and Nitrox with PADI) and thinking up ways to annoy the cats. I'm busy with other things these days so I expect that SCUBA will be an occasional venture and no longer the main weekend event. Besides, I've seen most of the local dive sites back when they had big fish on them.

My day job is at the St. Petersburg Times where I've been in various positions since 1981. My specialty is prepress production systems and I head up a very talented group of IT specialists. I'm mostly into Solaris development (sockets and general utilities) using C, although I spend a considerable amount of time coding on the PC and performing unnatural acts with databases. My official title is Prepress/Operations Technical Team Lead.

The 8" 'Fritz' scope and my first attempt at making my own telescope and optics. Although small, only 4' long, it is great for Lunar viewing and I use it during public astronomy talks.

My latest projects are mirror grinding and telescope making at the Mirror Lab of the St. Petersburg Astronomy Club on Saturdays. There is a great satisfaction in looking at the cosmos through a telescope that you made with your own hands. As I write this, the 8" mirror and Fritz scope are finished (photo left), as is the 12.5" Griffin Scope. The 18" Maxx telescope was finally finished and had first light on 2/6/2010, just four days before the star party.

While working on the 12.5" I was told about an interesting home-made B-Box project. A B-Box is a interface between telescope encoders and a laptop computer. The end result is similar to digital setting circles. The B-Box parts cost about $20, but the interesting thing was the microprocessor that controlled it - a PIC 16F84. I started this not knowing diddly about electronics but everything worked on the first try. Yeeeeha! In fairness, it was a really easy, well laid-out circuit board with great instructions (Thanks David!).

In the last year or so I have become a PIC junkie. I even know what a PNP transistor does now (hurts when you step on it barefoot). I finished a Bluetooth remote NGC display, a three axis quadrature encoder reader and TBL230 based dark sky meter using the CCS compiler. Currently I'm soldering up a stepper controller board for a robotic Foucault tester. I have no idea where this will all end up, but if I quit learning new things I might become one of those people that sits in front of of the tube watching American Idol year after year - yikes!

The 18" blank before any grinding in early 2004. The mirror is 1/7th wave and the telescope is finished.

I've also been known to spend some time Geocaching. Geocaching is the 'sport' of hunting down hidden boxes of Dollar Store junk with an expensive GPS and a few billion dollars worth of military satellites. The best part of this is that I've visited many great parks that I never knew existed. Some of the more memorable trips were wandering alone into a cypress swamp at dusk and the combo of Infochallenge South and Going for Distance in Balm Boyette Preserve, which turned into a 18 mile no-trail bike ride over two days. My biggest beef with using a mapping GPS in some if these areas is that there's no decent GPS maps for them, so I became an amateur cartographer and started making my own GPS maps. You really get to know an area well when you are collecting data to map it and then draw it with a resolution of a few feet.

Allow me to recommend some of the books that I have enjoyed lately: Shadow Divers was a fantastic, true(ish) tale about some New Jersey technical divers (modern term) discovering a German U-Boat that shouldn't have been there. I believe that it will be a movie in the next year or two. The Elegant Universe, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report, and Five ages of the Universe. I read The Fabric Of The Cosmos, by Brian Greene (he also wrote The Elegant Universe) twice and then bought it on CD to absorb any parts that I still missed. This book is the first one that I have read explains WHY the universe inflated, among other things - cool stuff! For a little lighter reading check out Bill Bryson's exceptional work, A Short History of Nearly Everything - The Yellowstone section will knock your socks off. I'll also throw into the lighter category First Light, by Richard Preston, who also wrote The Hot Zone and, last, but not least, Seeing In The Dark by Timothy Ferris. Seeing In The Dark covers many of the advanced amateur astronomers and some are locals that I have gone stargazing with. These books are are all worth reading and a few are now on audio CDs (great for long drives). Now I put them on the iPod and could likely drive across her country and back before needing to reload it. Make sure that you get the unabridged versions, if it is offered, so that you don't miss the good stuff.

Over the past years I have had the pleasure to visit some remarkable locations. My favorites were: The reefs of Cozumel, Museums of Washington DC, Arches National Park in Utah, Acadia National Park in Maine, Grand Canyon National Park, a too short visit to Yosemite National Park and a couple of weeks on a houseboat in the Florida Keys SCUBA diving until I looked like a mutant prune, among others. It's been a while since I've been to the Keys. Maybe it's time to go back.

The to-do list in no special order...

I need to visit and leave Yellowstone before it blows up. Learn what all of the buttons on the digital cameras do - I love going out just to take photos. Learn Java programming (I've finally taken my first steps into these waters in mid 2011). Take a leisurely drive through the Smoky Mountains, go swimming in Manatee Springs, revisit the Edison house...

I can now scratch three items off of my to-do list. In 2007 I attended the Stellafane convention in Vermont, visited the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary and took up kayaking. The latter will keep me busy for a while.

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