Hobbies

There are lots of things I like to do, but I'm not going to list them all (you can sigh with relief now). I'll tell you all about the exciting things I like to do until I get tired of the process. It remains to be seen whether you will tire of reading before I tire of writing. Well, shall we begin?

Board games are great fun. Lots of people don't seem to enjoy them, not sure why that is. Family gatherings often involve the playing of games. Games are a good way to interact with other people. Conversation often goes well with games; plus, there is something to do if you don't have anything to say. There are also games that take more thinking like checkers, othello, chess, and go. I like all of the first three and would like to learn to play go sometime. Othello is my current favorite. You can think hard about your move or just play somewhere. The games can be pretty fast, and it has an elegance in its simplicity.

Programming is a fun pastime. My favorite language is Python. You can get things done faster and with fewer headaches in Python than any other language I've used. I've recently investigated PHP, and parts of this website are written in PHP. It has some nice features, and I'll undoubtedly do more things in PHP, but Python is still on top. The first programming language I learned was Pascal. I really enjoyed using it and am glad I learned it first and not something like C/C++. I later learned C++, and it has some nice features. More recently, I've learned assembly language for a few different processors. It's good to know, but it's not going to qualify as my favorite language.

I've been looking over my descriptions of this section, and I realized that I talked about screen shots. So where are they? Well, there is now a page of screen shots. It may take a little while to load, though I'll try to keep it from getting too big. Enjoy.

Page layout is something else I enjoy doing. I was the school newspaper editor my senior year in academy. I wrote, edited, did page layout, managed mailings, and convinced people to write articles for me. It was great fun. We published 2 papers a month, and I even got to talk to the printer. Ah yes, about page layout. Whether it's for a newspaper or a website, creating a pleasing design is an enjoyable activity.

Camping and hiking are both fun. I like to go backpacking, but it is not because I enjoy hiking with a big pack on my back more than without, although that was a big part of the fun on one trip not too long ago. No, generally speaking, the point of backpacking is to reach some quite beautiful place that won't be disturbed by things like the the obnoxious sound of someone's blaring radio. The difficulty of reaching the spot helps to protect it. It also makes the spot nicer for having be earned. My idea of good backpacking is not to get as far as you can in a certain number of days, but instead to get to a quite secluded spot, a mountain lake for example, then enjoy being there for a while before hiking out.

Reading was one of my very favorite activities in past times. While I still enjoy it, it has been a long time since I had the time for reading I once had. Part of it, it is true, is really a matter of priority. We make time for the things that are most important to us. I guess reading is not as important to me as it once was. I do not have a deliberate time set aside in my schedule for recreational reading. Perhaps I should. I did do some recreational reading over Christmas break. It is spring break as I write this, and I have so much planned for this vacation that there will be little time for reading. The perceptive reader will notice that, while I don't have time to read, I obviously have time to work on my new web page. So it is. Writing has partially taken the place of reading in recent times. I started keeping a journal last summer, and that writing takes a good deal of energy, energy that would have otherwise been directed elsewhere, perhaps toward reading. At a certain time in the past I could say, almost certainly toward reading. I think it's good for the other things to have found a place in my interest, but the reading ought not be neglected. It is a very worthy hobby.

Taking pictures is another hobby of mine. If you visit the photographs section, you will notice that I got a digital camera not long ago. I have a film camera that I really like, but it is to big to carry with me on hikes and backpacking trips. If I was going to get a smaller camera, it might as well be a digital one so I can have the advantages of both instead of having an inferior film camera whose only advantage over my other camera is its size. Well, the digital camera is great. While the picture quality isn't as good as a film camera, it is good. I like being able to take 300 pictures at a time. That's a good ten roles of film. I've already got a few hundred pictures. I can take as many as I want without worries about buying or processing film. That is very nice. I'm now set up to keep my pictures organized. I wrote a small Python program to name a sequence of pictures. Say I have 200 pictures, but I delete half of them randomly interspersed among the ones I keep. Now I have a hundred pictures named from 1 to 200. Very messy. With my program, I can rename them all in one fell swoop so now they are named from 1 to 100. (Actually, numbering begins at 0 with padding zeros and an option string before and behind the number.) I'm hoping to take some good landscape pictures that can be used as computer backgrounds. I already have a few, but I'd like to take more and start a collection in my photography section.