More than you care to know about the author

First my disclaimer: I make no money or receive any benefit (other than working on it is a hobby) from this web site. Any outside links here are because I believe that the product or store is worth looking into. Outside links will open a new browser window. Internal links generally take you to that page in your existing window. I do not use any cookies or other tracking methods.

A little about me. I grew up in the era of telephone party lines, riding my bike behind the mosquito control 'fogging' truck and the occasional trip to Shakey's Pizza Palor or Webb's City. In early 80s I lived about a year on God's Island, near Shell Key just North of Ft. DeSoto, without electricity or running water. Having only a kerosene lantern at night really got me into reading. The no-name storm of 1982 rearranged my living situation by destroying the A-Frame shack that I was living in and washing my bed to parts unknown. Back then there were no million dollar homes on the near-by shore, only a unkept golf course with a 10' berm.

After the storm I ended up on a houseboat in Hurricane Hole. This was the same time that movie Summer Rental was filming the sailing scene about 50 yards away behind was was the then the 7-11. It was a great lifestyle until Billy Morning's restaurant started to go in and the pile drivers started at 8am about a dozen feet from the boat. At the time I was working a 7pm to 3am shift. With frequent overtime I often didn't get to sleep until 6am or the 8am alarm wasn't welcome. Fortunately those days are long gone. Now I live in a average house on an quiet street with way too much light pollution.

This is the only known photo of the A-Frame that I lived in on God's Island in 1982.

When the storm washed off the A-Frame (I was at work that night) I moved into the 52' Constant Agony Houseboat for a little while.

My free time is split between kayaking, photography, astronomy and building things. Much of the past couple of months has been working on updating the Robo Foucault tester (telescope mirror tester) The updates are rather extensive. On the rare occasions that the night sky is clear and somewhat dry I started to see if I could get any astrophotos of the dim fuzzy things that are up there.

Many of these things have their own pages on this site. This is likely the most unfocused page here. 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. Most of my kayaking treks are in the 5-15 mile range. Not exactly epic, but they make for a fun day. My kayaking page has much more information on the subject.

I've been into photography for more than 40 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.

My grandfather about 13 years old back in England in 1923.

Both my father and my grandfather were in the Boy Scouts. Other than watching from my roof and on TV the Apollo missions launch my first taste of astronomy was while in the Boy Scouts during a summer at Camp Soule (Camp Reed actually). One night Earnie, an Eagle Scout, was pointing out the constellations and that inspired me to work for my Astronomy merit badge. A few months later I was presented the merit badge and, in 1979, I joined Earnie and my father as an Eagle scout. In the mid to late 70's I worked at the summer camp as a Pioneering merit badge counselor and later as the Counselor In Training (CIT) director training new counselors. I'm also a TLDC and Wood Badge (Salty Foxes) graduate, attended a couple of national Scout Jamborees, once as a scout in Moraine State Park in 1977 and later as an Assistant Scout Master at Ft. A.P. Hill in 1981 and one national Order of the Arrow conference at Colorado State University in 1979.

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.

Outside of astronomy I'm into SCUBA. Back in my youth in the late 60's and early 70's I loved to watch The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I was fascinated by the Auqalung that allowed divers to breath underwater. In my early teens I would ride my bike a few miles to gawk at the US Divers display at Bill Jackson's, a local sporting goods store, back then located about 4th Street and 12th Ave S. in St. Petersburg. This was a time of the unbalanced double hose regulators - primitive by today's open circuit regulator standards. I frequently thought about becoming a certified diver and and in the summer of 1981 I completed my Open Water certification class. My certifications are with NASDS, SSI and PADI. My Nitrox (Enriched Oxygen) certification is with PADI.

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. It's still fun to visit the keys and enjoy clear water. It's getting more difficult to find a live reef.

My previous career day job was at the Tampa Bay Times where I was in various positions from 1981 until I retired in 2022 - that's over 40 years. My last position was the IT Technical Lead working in infrastructure - networks, servers and cyber security. In the past I have worked in the Ad Production Dept as a Harris 2220 Operator and, later a supervisor. In 1994 I transferred to the IT department where I focused on Solaris development (sockets and general utilities) using C. One of my larger projects was writing the system that created PostScript newspaper pages with ads on them at the rate of 110 newspaper pages a minute on a Sun Sparc 2.

Six months before Y2K (yep, that was a thing) I was handed a VB6 compiler and asked to learn the language and rewrite the Times Ad Tracking System, which I pulled off with 3 weeks to spare. After that I was part of the Server Admin team for about five years. For about seven years beginning 2006 I was the Prepress Technical Team lead which was a combination of news, ad and archive systems administration ad workflow management. I also switched from VB to C# for any new coding. After being tech lead I was promoted to Solutions Engineer for a couple of years where I researched and implemented new systems and their integration and interfacing with existing systems. After some company downsizing I became a Business Analysis for a couple of years and later worked in web development for a year and a half before moving to infrastructure where I worked on network and server security. Please use Multi-Factor Authentication whenever possible.

Times printed at the 34th street Plant for the last time

I was at the 34th street printing plant the evening that last edition of the Tampa Bay Times was printed there on March 6th, 2021 for the March 7th edition. It was a bit sad to see the presses shut down for the last time before the Lakeland Ledger took over the two day a week printing and the building was sold. I retired a little over a year after this. My last month was mostly spent documenting everything that I touched and knew about that was still in use or may be in the future. I made the right choice at the right time for my exit. Good luck Tampa Bay Times and all of the remaining staffers!

Beginning in late 2023 I modernized all of these pages using responsive design. This allows the content to wrap appropriately based on the width of the display. This should allow wide screen PCs, tablets and phones to see everything up to their ability. I update these pages regularly. My new (2024) web logo represents my feeble attempt at astrophotography.

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

I ground, polished and figured a half dozen Newtonian telescope mirrors and taught the process for more than 17 years at the SPAC 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. The mirror lab and science center shut down in mid 2019. I current have four of the telescopes that I built ranging from the 8" Fritz scope to the The 18" Maxx telescope was finally finished and had first light on 2/6/2010, just four days before the star party. After making my first telescope I assisted at the Mirror Lab soon became an instructor there for over 14 years.

The last telescope that I built was the relatively light weight 1" thick mirror that became the lightish weight f4.66 16" Mini Maxx telescope. When I started this mirror in March 2017 it was used more than 40 years before that as a tool for a 3" thick 16" mirror. It took a while to make the convex curve concave. It still had red rouge caked to the plate glass.

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 few years I have enjoyed working with PIC microcontrollers with my favorite being the 16F88 at the moment. 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 using gray code and TBL230 based dark sky meter using the CCS compiler. I recently designed a dew heater controller using a PIC 16F88 and we have made 18 of them at the Mirror lab.

The 18" blank during the 'hogging out' process in mid 2004. This is where the initial curve is ground out of the mirror. In this case almost 1/4" of glass was removed from the center. The mirror finished at 1/7th wave and the Maxx telescope is finished.

I've also been known to spend some time Geocaching, especially when it first started. 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 that download into a Garmin GPS. 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. 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.

I went through a caving phase with the Deep Zone, Beyond the Deep and Blind Descent. If you are not familiar with a Rappel Rack you'll want to look it up after reading these. Before the 2020 pandemic I read The Coming Plague which is a heartwarming story about how much microbes enjoy our company. Good timing! On that vein consider reading The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story by Richard Preston (Hot Zone). It's the story of smallpox and eliminating it in the wild. This will make you appreciate that after 1977 you shouldn't need to worry about catching smallpox.

Hanging out at the Very Large Array (VLA). Remember the movie Contact?

Over the past years I have had the pleasure to visit some remarkable locations. My favorites were: Palancar Gardens and Caves 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 near Marquesas SCUBA diving until I looked like a mutant prune. Of special note was a late night dive on the USCG Bibb where I felt more distant from people than I have before or since. While memorable, my dive buddy was mostly MIA and this was one of the few dives that I really should not have made.

Life's been good to me so-far.

Allen's Place