About Me

I lost my webpage and had to recreate it from scratch.

I have been designing and building Electronic Projects since I was very young. I connected 2 handsets to my mother's phone when I was 7 so that 2 people could talk on the phone at the same time.

I used to solder battery connector wires for my friend's radios. I converted my wood burning iron into a soldering iron back then,

I figured out how to make a breaker finder. I soldered the 2 plug wires together and blew a fuse. Crash course on how electricity flows in a circuit.

I wired a clock radio in the dining room to a speaker in my bedroom.

In grade 5, I would help my brother with his grade 10 programming. I had a natural talent for Electronics and Programming.

Also in grade 5, I pondered and realized the philosophical concept of why everybody was different. Up to that point I just assumed that everybody was into electronics and was technical minded. I then started into basic astrology to try to explain why everyone was so vastly different.

FARMING

In grade 4, we used to go sailing on Lake Ontario in Pickering and we went on my first camping trip on Rice Lake near Peterborough. I  still love camping. I try to go every year.

In grade 5, My stepfather sold his boat and purchased a 50 acre farm north of Belleville. With my grandfather's help, they poured the foundation and started building the house. The wood was salvaged from a farmhouse on Steeles avenue near Jane street. The wood was true sized 2x4's, and 2x6's, not the new lumber that is 1.75 x 3.5 inches. We pulled 1000's of nails out of the wood and piled it up on the boat trailer.

In grade 6, winter, we finally moved into the house. We had no electricity nor water. I remember seeing snow drifts across the living room floor in the morning. The water jugs would freeze overnight right beside the wood stove. It did not take us long to insulate and vapour barrier the walls. I was fascinated by how I could see outside through the cracks in the outside wall at night during a full moon. It was my job to fill up the camping light and camping stove with naptha gas.

Our bathroom was outside at first, we had to go dig a hole in a snowbank with a shovel. What a mess that was in the spring.

When spring came, and the snow started to melt, a black bear decided to pay us a visit. We all just went to bed and then the main level garage doors shook. We then heard something coming up the side staircase. We kept out camping cooler with meats in it at the top of the stairs. My stepfather grabbed a flashlight assuming that it was a racoon. He opened the door and to his surprise, he was face to face with a black bear. He closed the door.  My mother asked him what was there. He said "Bear." She said "Bare what?" He said "Bear Bear!" I still remember this clearly.  We asked the ministry to trap and release the bear but they refused. My stepfather ended up setting bait and shooting it.

That spring, we bought a chemical toilet and dug a hole by the barn and built an outhouse.  Nothing like wiping with pages from the Sears catalog.

We used to go swimming in the summer at the Roslyn dam.  I started making new friends in the Tweed school. My stepfather was an alcoholic. I use to cater to him to keep the peace. He would drink up to 3 bottles of rum each weekend.

I remember nailing down plywood over the flooring. I was asked to nail it with a 4 inch square grid across the entire floor. 288 nails per s4x8 sheet. He wired the house and could not figure out the 3 way, 4 way, 3 way switch for the staircase and he asked me to figure it out. I did.

That was the year that I figured out that AC electricity is  capacitively conducted through your rubber shoes into concrete. I got zapped soldering a live wire in a radio. I also figure out that you should not use a 16 volt capacitor in an unregulated 12 volt power supply. When it blew, it sounded exactly like a 12 gauge shotgun. It smelled like vinegar and the capacitor can got lodged in the ceiling.

I bought 8 x 2102 memory chips  by mail from the USA. I was experimenting reading and writing to the chips with data and outputting the binary data to LED's. In 1978, at 14 , I am now amazed at how advanced I was.

By grade 9, I went to Madoc high school. There was no computer course available for me and I instantly figured out how to program in Fortran. I used to go to the keypunch machines and write programs for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and printing  formatted calendars with loops.  It was on an IBM 029 keypunch and all the programming students would get mad at me for using it. I used to transport the card in my lunchbox.

I had enough of the physical and emotional abuse from my stepfather and decided to move in with my father, in Bradford over grade 6 Christmas.

BRADFORD

My father was into electronics and had built a Heathkit H8 8080 CPU computer. Within a few weeks, I had mastered Basic, 8080 machine language and the entire schematic of the computer. I was teasing him about how simple the computer programming was and he dropped the Heathkit Basic Language exam in front of me. I earned 3 CE credits in April.

Courtesy of Wilipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H8#/media/File:Heathkit_H-8_computer.jpg

I entered a biorythm program, from a magazine. I wrote an 8080 machine language game using the front keypad and LED display and sound effects on the motherboard speaker. I had to hand assemble the op codes into offset octal instructions to manually punch into the memory from the front keypad.

I took grade 10 computer programming in the second half of grade 9 and learned COBOL. Bradford High School used bubble cards for programming.

I had a falling out with my stepmother and moved in with my brother in Toronto in the summer. I was emotionally damaged and still had to learn how to deal with conflict properly.

EMERY COLLEGIATE

 I got 91 in grade 9 math and decided to take  foundations (enriched) math following that. I took  grade 11 enriched and 12 math basic in 1980-81  then grade 12 enriched in 1981-82. My math teacher was also an Astrologer and spoke with every student after class and taught us all astrology,  I excelled in tech and kept failing English. Summer school.... (I later taught an unofficial astrology class for the grade 12 students.)

I started working part time and ended up at Stereoland. I became the warehouse supervisor.  I rewired the car stereo board and was asked to do installations for customers.

My grade 12 Electronics project was to modify my AKAI GX-F80 cassette deck to do music search. That really impressed my Electronics teacher. The GX-F85 had that feature built in and I knew I could build a circuit that would press the play button when the digital VU meter stopped registering music on fast forward. 

By the time I was in grade 12, I wanted to go to University of Waterloo for Computer Engineering but there was an 80% entrance grade requirement. With my bad marks in English and Chemistry, there was no way I would get admitted, so I decided to work full time in programming at Stereoland.

My boss saw my abilities and skills. He asked me one day in 1992, "If I buy a computer, can you set it up for me?" I said yes and that was my first programming for money job. I got paid $5/Hr programming the Radio Shack TRS-80 model II in Assembly language.

Courtesy of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H8#/media/File:Heathkit_H-8_computer.jpg

It took me a year to write the software. At least this time there was a compiler. Z80 Machine Language. I wrote Inventory and Customer Database file. Saving random records to the floppy drive, I indexed the files so that the records could be accessed alphabetically. I would track the inventory, and print out regular price lists for the sales team. The customer database was link list sorted so that you could scroll through the sorted list using the up and down keys to remove duplicate names. I also saved the category of inventory that the customers purchased so that I could generate mailing labels selected by purchase category for targeted advertising. One mailing that we did had 3000 letters. I was so proud of that software. The indexing code was all manually programmed in Z80.

I wrote time sharing login into the program so that I could be doing Data Entry while it was printing. It was so funny. Every time that I started typing, the printer would pause. When I lifted my hands, it would resume.

1992 was the year that the PC-XT came out with the exciting MS-DOS, and Windows 3.1, and mouse. It was too late, this computer was already purchased.

Stereoland closed in 1993. I purchased a lot of equipment by then. I still have it all now in 2025.

EARLY CAREER

I worked as a programmer for various companies after that. First, at Bowin Screw Products. My father worked there and I did some summer work painting the bathrooms before that. He bought 2 PC's and wanted me to write software that would simplify his calculations for estimating, setting up machines and quality control. I did. The software was all in GW-BASIC and the programs were all linked together by a menu. The estimating program saved its records sequentially to floppy disks. 333 quotes per disk. I set it up so that the 2 computers would transfer any changes to the database to the other computer so that they both had the same database on 2 separate floppies.  Some companies that I worked for over the years still use that Estimating program in 2025.

I wrote the inventory control using dBase and clipper compiler. Customer database, management, SPC software, and  all the programs used to cut the cams for the different screw machines was all in BASIC.  One of the programs was a trigonometry program that you could fill in any 2 sides and an angle or 3 sides  and it would calculate the rest of the sides and angles. One program was called SFM that would calculate the rise of the cam to feed a drill bit into any material bar at any rotation speed. The hardest program was SPC. I had to learn how to calculate Sigma and print out formatted graphs showing the measurements of various parts in and out of tolerance.

After that, I decided to go back to  High School and work on my Grade 13.  I could not get my head around Matrices in my Algebra class and dropped it. I did pretty good in the other courses but never completed my grade 13. I decided to go back to work as a programmer.

QUANTEL

I got a good programming job at Quantel programming a minicomputer system. The system was called QMRP (Quantel Material Requirements Planning)

I rewrote the entire payroll system to fix the holiday pay tax calculation bug. I made the system so that It could correctly calculate payroll taxes if you have more weeks of pay on one pay check. I also was flown to Montreal for customer training on the new system.

Thanks to S3 computer history website:  https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/quantel.systems-1100-1200.1974.102646311.pdf

The Markham company moved back to California and I decided to go back for training.

THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPUTER STUDIES

I managed to get an all expenses paid spot in their Systems Analysis and programming course. I graduated with 91%

While I was there I was luck enough to  pick up SUN Microsystems certifications for Sun Net Manager, System Administration and a few other courses.

When I graduated from there I immediately got a full time System Administration and Programming job downtown at the Learn Group of Companies, Image Impressions division.

ELECTRONICS

I kept learning and tinkering with electronics. 

In 1979, I built a bicycle odometer and speedometer. I never used it because it would drain 4 C batteries in a few hours.

I fixed many Tube TV's and transistor amplifiers over the years and experimented with designing scrambled TV decoder circuits.

In 1983, I designed a car combination keypad to lock and unlock the doors, just like the one that Ford has on their cars now.

In 1992, I built a 15 inch subwoofer in a 8 cubic foot box. Before that, I had 2 speakers on a baffle in my bedroom closet.

In 1993, I designed and built a 150 watt DC amplifier to drive the speakers that I bought from Stereoland in 1983. I spoke with a technician at Panasonic and he suggested that I upgrade the op amps to J-Fet ultra low noise ones. With no input and the volume all the way up, you could not hear any hiss from the speakers.

My father was an Amateur Radio operator VE3INP and I tried to get my licence in 1980. I passed the Morse code and almost passed the theory and regulations. I started teaching the Theory in 2021 and finally wrote the exams again in 2023. I got 91% on the basic exam and 94% after studying for 2 weeks on the Advanced exam. I am now VA3UTT and I am licenced to build my own transmitting equipment, and install antenna towers, etc..

I decided to go to Humber Polytechnic after Covid for Electronics Engineering Technology 3-year Advanced Diploma. I graduated with Honours in 2024.  I received 3 scholarships for that.  One from IEEE Toronto and one from Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC.org)

I also decided to volunteer my services for IEEE while there. I ended up being the IEEE Student Branch Chair for 3 years. That was a wonderful experience.

While being a student member of IEEE, I hosted Amateur Radio Study group sessions for students to become Amateur Radio Operators.