Anyone do any trades or hobbies?

[UptonSinclair]

That is why we all love you Upton! hey if you can change your mind then so can I You are my justification for track changes all the time! How's the MBA going?

I decided to continue undergraduate studies for now. I want to get through the Calculus sequence before I decide what to do next.

[SteveFoerster]

I am curious on does anyone do any trades or hobbies?

Gaming with my kids is one hobby. Mostly Dungeons and Dragons, but we also made a space battle game that uses a normal deck of cards.

[owner66]

I mess with Arduino. I made an automated chicken coop door opener earlier in the year and finished another to use a crock pot as a sous-vide cook. Although I just use it to make yogurt currently. Sous-vide is not all it's cracked up to be.

[AngelaP]

OMG that was great!!

I create generic degree plans that mostly utilize tests and try to find alternative sources of credit. I'm being serious. hilarious

I also create hip hop and R&B tracks on FL Studio. If I had more time and money, I would be earning certifications galore even though I don't know how I would keep up with the continuing education requirements. Currently, I'm working on the Enrolled Agent designation. I just have one more test to pass. After that, I'll probably work on CISSP or patent agent. At least being a patent agent doesn't require continuing education credits. Once I have the money, I plan on taking a phlebotomy course. I purchased to books to study for the pharmacy technician and optician tests, but didn't have time to read them. When I work on my dissertation, I just might start the police academy. I've also looked at distance learning programs for becoming an EMT and firefighter. When I graduate from my PhD program, I will be taking the licensed chemical dependency counselor test. My dream is to become the most certified person in a wide array of fields on the planet. Unfortunately, I had to let my security license expire and drop my Class B CDL. But, I will have my telecommunicator license forever! That reminds me that I will have to renew my Basic Life Support for Healthcare Providers certification soon. milelol:

[Johann]

I mess with Arduino...

Single-board computers like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are fantastic! At 72, I'm late to the game, but my son gave me a Beaglebone Black for Christmas, as I'd expressed curiosity about that particular machine. He's an Arduino man himself, although he also has a couple of Raspberry Pi's around the house.

I got a power supply and really sharp plastic case for the Beaglebone, fired it up and it worked! Right now, it uses its native Angstrom Linux as its OS, but I have what I need to image the particular Ubuntu Linux distro that's designed for it. I have a long learning curve ahead of me, with Bonescript, NodeJS etc. From what his Dad tells me, my 11-year-old grandson has become very adept at Arduino programming and uses them mostly in robotics applications - that's his chief interest.

Boy, how things change! This $45 board itself, with no extras hooked up to it, has 200 times the processing speed, over 500 times the RAM and 100 times the storage of my first off-brand PC, that cost me $1,000 in 1988 or 89 - including a few hundred for the 20-meg HD! And the Beaglebone also has snazzy HDMI zillion-color video output instead of green, blurry mono-CGA!

Johann

[JohnnyHeck]

Hello Johann. Happy to know there is at least one other fellow dinosaur on this forum. I'm the last totally slide rule trained engineer, NU BSCE'70. Bought the second generation financial calculator for $100 1969, the Bowmar Brain was the first in 1968. My first computer in 1984 was the portable HP110, $2995, with a screen of 16 lines and a RAM of 272 KB with Memomaker and Lotus 123 imbedded in ROM. I programmed it in language called Paschal. I bought my first off-brand PC about 1986, which my wife used to be the first dial--up online class (w/2-2week on-campus stints required) of MHAs at CSU graduating in 2 years in 1989. This is only 25 years ago! The pace of change is certainly accelerating. Let's try to stay in the game as long as we can. Best regards.

[LaterBloomer]

Johann and JohnnyHeck, I know you're kidding about the dinosaur thing. Be bold and unapologetic in your interests and don't bow to the popular misconception that computers/electronics/etc. are a young (wo)man's game. We shouldn't play into that fallacy. Many years ago, I went to a local community group as it had a lecture on building a computer. I don't know how many years ago that was, but everyone was what I'd call old. (I'm probably that age now!) They were talking about digital cameras, and that was when digital cameras cost thousands of dollars. My aunt started using the Internet and e-mail before I (or Katie Couric!) knew what they were! Although I'm far from being a nerd (never did make that computer), I am still ahead of some folks who are younger than I am.

[JohnnyHeck]

Whose kidding? My proud nickname is Tyrannosaurus Rex!

[Johann]

Whose kidding? My proud nickname is Tyrannosaurus Rex!

And mine is Tatankaceratops. It means "Bison Horn Face" and I think it suits me. If I remember "Tatanka" correctly from Kevin Costner's "Dances with Wolves," then "Tatankaceratops" appears to be a Sioux and Greek combination - quite unusual. More on that beast here: Tatankaceratops - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

"A language called Paschal?" I think that's Pascal you're referring to, named after 17th c. French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, here:

http://www.biography.com/people/blaise-pascal-9434176

Borland Turbo Pascal was very popular in DOS days and there were Windows versions too. Embarcadero Delphi (originally a Borland product) uses Object Pascal in its compilers. That language is described here: Delphi (programming language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . These days, Free Pascal is quite popular with programmers. Somewhere on a CD I have a compiler for (interpreted) Basic that works by first translating the Basic code into Free Pascal before compilation.

I started using (and working with, to some extent) mainframe computers in the early 70s. The first programming course I ever took was in COBOL, still in the 70s. Danged punchcards! My first personal computer was a Timex Sinclair in 1982. It cost around $100 and had 2K of RAM. By comparison, my credit-card-sized Beaglebone has over 250,000 times that much! Ten years after, in the early 1990s, I dusted off the Timex and loaded up some cassette tapes of old programs I'd written -- and they still worked! I also had a massive 16K RAM expander that cost another $100. That computer is now in a local high school's "computer museum" along with my Commodore VIC-20 and some other Pleistocene relics. The Timex-Sinclair could be programmed in its own Basic dialect, and I still use Basic sometimes today - mostly in Windows versions, though.

One of my other long-term hobbies is photography. After about 30 years of film photography, I found SLRs were too clunky and bulky to use while following fast-moving small grandchildren. Around that time, my son gave me a compact digital camera and I've never looked back. For a couple of years prior to going digital, I'd been getting my pictures transferred to CDs as jpegs, so I could crop, enhance and alter them with computer software. Now I have four digital cameras - three Canons and a Pentax. The fun continues!

Johann

[jgbenjamin]

I would do more if I could stay alert during the day; anyone have any alertness tips?? Elventh grade has me busy:Health, English11, US History... Also my dad has me using this program to study for certain clep exams(not my idea). I also have a wonderfulcat Bush!!!