One of my first construction projects that I undertook after buying my new house was to build regulation Horseshoe Pits. I’ve been playing horseshoes since I was ten.  Although I’ve never been very good at it I just enjoy playing and always challenge summer visitors to a match.

Another hobby that never seem to get enough time is fishing. The many small streams and creeks around Owen Sound offer opportunities to catch Speckled and Brown Trout.  Then every Fall the Salmon and Lake Trout return to the Rivers.

My love of fishing is best enjoyed when combined with one of my other hobbies, Camping. By camping I mean tenting with the only luxury being an air mattress. There is nothing better than sleeping outdoors and cooking breakfast over a fire in the morning. Algonquin Park is one of the best places for a Fishing-Camping trip.  However it’s wise to carry a can of bear spray with you and keep all food well away from your tent. I also go camping at Sauble Falls, Grundy Lake, and by the Saco River in New Hampshire.

Another pastime for me has been my love of computer programming.  I first became interested in programming when I attended NSIT in 1973 where I learned HP Basic.  I then went on to learn Fortran and Pascal at RRMC and later studied ADA in DMCS and C#.  This led to an interest in programming interactive websites in HTML, Java, and ASP.  I successfully built and sold a number of shopping cart websites for businesses in the late 1990s.  This was quite an accomplishment give that at that time good interactive websites were rare and very expensive.

This website is a good example of my work. It is programmed in HTML5, JavaScript and ASP.  It’s designed to run equally well offline from Flash Drive as it does online running on an Internet Server. For example, the ’Comments’ links only appear when run online and use server-side script to read and write information to a database.

The hobby that I spend the most time on by far is restoring vintage radios  I first became interested in restoring radios when I built a vacuum tube radio in my grade 10 electronics class. This interest was reinforced by my study of Vacuum Circuits in the Navy in my early trades training. I then began collecting vintage radios with the intention of restoring each of them. Unfortunately I didn’t get much time to restore many of them because of my busy career.  However this didn’t stop me from continuing to collect them  My collection largely involves radios manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s with a few from the 1920s and 1950s. 

There are a few radios from my collection shown below  However to get a good understanding of what I do, and see how I add Bluetooth to old radios, you have to visit my website at www.oldfidelity.com 

1946 RCA Radio-Phono	1949 Westinghouse	1951 Zenith Oceanic	1947 Sparton Radio
1930 Rogers 610	1933 General Electric	1946 Philco Phonograph	1931 Westinghouse

 

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