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Wired Weird Web
This site is just a miscellanious collection of pages that allow me to share my hobbies and interests, and a little bit of
background. Nothing fancy, just simple web pages.
A little background first...
As a kid living out in the country among the agriculture fields of the San Juaquin valley I spent a good bit of my time (when not in school) exploring the farm machinery and the random passageways in the stacks of hay bales in the huge barn next to our home, and watching my dad when he worked on the machinery or on cars in the garage for extra income. Through my observations of him doing his magic on the machinery and cars I began to understand how he could look at some mechanical assembly, figure it out in his mind, and then repair or modify it without the help of any manuals. What I observed of his abilities had an impact on my early curiosity and interests. I began fiddling with small mechanical things at a very young age (my parents would let me take small things apart to learn how they worked) then later I picked up some electronics intrests from my uncle who was living with us for a while and became curious about the TV and radios we had and learned how to work on and repair them by testing and changing the bad or weak vacuum tubes that were generally in use at the time. I had developed an interest in things electronic back then although I didn't know it was even called 'electronics' at the time.
My journey into electronics as a hobby began in the early 1970's when I accidentally learned the resistor color code while drilling my uncle (still living with us) when he was taking electronics courses at a local trade school. Soon after that I built a workbench for myself (working with wood... another thing I learned from my dad), collected some parts from old electronic devices I had taken apart and tried to build some simple circuits (from examples in books) early on but with no real success, which caused a little frustration, leading me to later enroll in electronics classes in high school. There I learned and gradually began to understanding how electronic devices worked. The teacher would collect broken TV's and other electronic equipment and, as a reward for learning, told us if we could fix one of these broken items then we could keep it and take it home. This was motivation enough for all of us in the class to learn well, then choose something and go to work troubleshooting it. Before long I had repaired myself a nice black & white console TV with a 'clicker' remote control. That ended up in my bedroom as my trophy.
I continued my electronics education, graduating from DeVry Technical Institute in Phoenix a few years later and began my carrier as an electronics technician at my first job in the bay area. I've had many jobs since then but have intensified my hobby interest in electronics over all these years as well as adding maybe too many other hobbies along the way.
This site gives me a chance to share some of those interests, detail some projects, and maybe help someone else become more interested in electronics as a hobby and/or carrier.
I have other non-electronic hobbies so decided to include those here also... why not? :)
I also have a separate website dedicated to my obsession with lasers and animated Christmas holiday lighting - the last two link bars above.
I hope you enjoy the website and learn something along the way!
A little background first...
As a kid living out in the country among the agriculture fields of the San Juaquin valley I spent a good bit of my time (when not in school) exploring the farm machinery and the random passageways in the stacks of hay bales in the huge barn next to our home, and watching my dad when he worked on the machinery or on cars in the garage for extra income. Through my observations of him doing his magic on the machinery and cars I began to understand how he could look at some mechanical assembly, figure it out in his mind, and then repair or modify it without the help of any manuals. What I observed of his abilities had an impact on my early curiosity and interests. I began fiddling with small mechanical things at a very young age (my parents would let me take small things apart to learn how they worked) then later I picked up some electronics intrests from my uncle who was living with us for a while and became curious about the TV and radios we had and learned how to work on and repair them by testing and changing the bad or weak vacuum tubes that were generally in use at the time. I had developed an interest in things electronic back then although I didn't know it was even called 'electronics' at the time.
My journey into electronics as a hobby began in the early 1970's when I accidentally learned the resistor color code while drilling my uncle (still living with us) when he was taking electronics courses at a local trade school. Soon after that I built a workbench for myself (working with wood... another thing I learned from my dad), collected some parts from old electronic devices I had taken apart and tried to build some simple circuits (from examples in books) early on but with no real success, which caused a little frustration, leading me to later enroll in electronics classes in high school. There I learned and gradually began to understanding how electronic devices worked. The teacher would collect broken TV's and other electronic equipment and, as a reward for learning, told us if we could fix one of these broken items then we could keep it and take it home. This was motivation enough for all of us in the class to learn well, then choose something and go to work troubleshooting it. Before long I had repaired myself a nice black & white console TV with a 'clicker' remote control. That ended up in my bedroom as my trophy.
I continued my electronics education, graduating from DeVry Technical Institute in Phoenix a few years later and began my carrier as an electronics technician at my first job in the bay area. I've had many jobs since then but have intensified my hobby interest in electronics over all these years as well as adding maybe too many other hobbies along the way.
This site gives me a chance to share some of those interests, detail some projects, and maybe help someone else become more interested in electronics as a hobby and/or carrier.
I have other non-electronic hobbies so decided to include those here also... why not? :)
I also have a separate website dedicated to my obsession with lasers and animated Christmas holiday lighting - the last two link bars above.
I hope you enjoy the website and learn something along the way!