Various Interests page index:
Goats
Boy Scouts
Mission trips
Stamp Collecting
Making Maple Syrup
Creation/Evolution
Hiking
Camping
Mazes
Life Goals
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During my years as a Boy Scout, I attended the Boy Scout camp Sabattis, in Sabattis, New York, deep in the Adirondack Park. At this rustic camp, I earned numerous merit badges, which are included in the list below. Our troop went on numerous camping trips, which included places like Sandy Hook, the New Jersey Pine Barrons, Gettysburg, Treasure Island (accessible only by boat), and numerous state forests in the northern New Jersey area. I also joined many other boys and adult leaders from troops in Northern New Jersey on a trip to Philmont, a Boy Scout hiking ranch in New Mexico. This trip was a week long hiking expedition deep into the woods and high into the mountains of the area. We carried everything we needed in packs for up to 2 days at a time.
I obtained Life Rank, which is just one rank below Eagle, the highest Rank in Boy Scouting. Though I remained a Boy Scout until I was 18, a primary reason for not obtaining Eagle Scout was pressures from school work. Even after I was 18, I remained in Scouting for an extra year as Assistant Scout Master. In this capacity, I continued to go on camping trips and attend Scout meetings, though not quite as frequently. I also helped organize our troop's equipment closet, which contained numerous tents, cooking utensils, fire building equipment, and many other tools used for camping and other activities.
The Merit Badges I earned include:
Camping, Canoeing, Citizenship in the Community, Citizenship in the Nation, Environmental Science, Finger Printing, First Aid, Mammals, Orienteering, Personal Management, Railroading, Rowing, Small Boat Sailing, Soil & Water, Stamp Collecting, Swimming, and Weather
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Our first trip was to Portland, Maine (1989). We worked with Habitat for Humanity, helping to build a house. A side project involved building a small shed on a separate plot of land.
The following year (1990), we went to Zywiec, Poland, where we worked closely with a small Presbyterian church. They had just moved into a new building, which needed a lot of yard work, as well as numerous chores inside the building. This involved cleaning up a plot of land and leveling it, placing drainage stones around the edge of the building, and laying cement in a few specific locations.
The following year (1991), we went to Philadelphia, where we worked with numerous inner city missionary organizations on various projects, including serving dinner to the homeless, yard work, and "street corner evangelism" in unconventional style. The street corner evangelism involved setting up in Liberty Park near the Liberty Bell, where we provided games for kids, painted pictures on their hands, and blew soap bubbles, among other activities. We were in Philadelphia from Sunday Morning until Wednesday Morning.
On Wednesday, we drove to Washington DC to attend DC '91, which was a Christian Youth Conference attended by some 14,000 other high school aged youth. We listened to dynamic speakers including Ron Hutchcraft and Becky Terabassi, and listened to Christian music by groups such as DC Talk and Carmen. It's amazing to see 14,000 teenagers at an age where kids tend to be the most rebellious, cheering for the Lord, cheering for things that Christians stand for, and pledging to make a difference in their world when they return from the conference.
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I also like to walk, particularly if I am going somewhere not far away. I can and usually do walk very fast when I am by myself, and for certain short trips, it is often just as effective to walk as it would be to drive. It may take a few minutes longer, but when you consider you are getting exercise instead of burning gas in the car, the difference balances out. I keep this fact in mind especially for trips of up to a mile or if I am going to a place within a short distance of public transit.
I used to jog a lot for the exercise benefit, as well as just to be able to get out into the fresh air. I did this in college a lot because I had friends who often went with me. Since then, I have not jogged very much mainly because of a problem with cramps. However, for the most part, I have replaced this activity with walking and hiking (see above).
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Hobby/Recreational Goals:
I would like to climb all 46 NY state high peaks.
I would like to ride on as many rail based transit systems as possible (ideally the entire system in as many cities as possible).
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In addition to the languages listed on my resume, I have also programmed in the following languages:
Ada
APL
assembly language (VAX/VMS and Macintosh)
BASIC
CLIPS
ECLIPS
Fox Pro
Java
Lisp
Macintosh Toolbox
Visual Basic
and others
By doing various jobs at the local Community Youth Center, you could earn points that you could then purchase almost anything you want with. This particular job was set up by the city of Summit through a grant to the Youth Center. The grant was for about $1000. This job was divided up into several routes, for which you could earn 4 points for doing each route, once per week. There were 3 routes, so a total of 12 points were available each week. If several people did the particular route, the points would be divided up between those who worked. For a little while, this worked fine. But after several weeks, I was the only one doing the work, and I eventually took over doing all the routes, earning 12 points per week!
The job took just 2 hours a week, and each point was worth $2, so the pay was great for a rather meanial job. If just one other person joined me, however, the pay would be half. But this rarely happened. After a while, I had accumulated a considerable number of points. When I tried to purchase something, the money had to be approved by some that were higher up than just the director of the Youth Center. I also came to the conclusion that I was (in good conscience) taking advantage of a perfect example of government waste!
My second and third year at Silver Bay I worked in the Summer Program Office, where my responsibilities included gathering the schedules of the various campus events and creating a Daily Prompter that listed the schedules of those events. As the name implies, the Daily Prompter is a daily one sheet publication that lists the times for activities, meetings, and events.
I was also responsible for making copies for the various departments, as well as newsletters or information sheets for the conferences that visit Silver Bay. Things that fall into this category range from 300 copies of a 3 page, double sided, collated and stapled newsletter that one large conference puts together on a daily basis for a week, to single copies for individuals. Over the course of these summers, this two-person office typically generated over 60,000 copies.
I also helped people on a variety of computer projects that are generated by the various departments. In one case, the boat house wanted to type up their note card file of people who had passed a boating class. Smaller requests come in on a regular basis from people who want sign up forms, signs, or other things easily done on a computer.
During my second year, I was able to establish 3 new e-mail addresses under the America Online account that Silver Bay already had. While one of them was used only once before being deleted, the other two have been used heavily. One is for Guests and Emps who wouldn't otherwise have access to E-mail, to be able to send and receive messages from friends. In the course of the first full summer of use, we exchanged over 300 messages on this address. The number of messages doubled the second summer and doubled again the third summer. The other address is used by the director of conference services, to communicate with people who bring conferences here so they can easily communicate to us the needs of their particular conference.
I am also known informally as a computer know-it-all type person. The level of computer knowledge at Silver Bay is pretty low, so my status in this area is somewhat relative. While I do know a lot about computers, I also know that many of my computer science major peers know a lot more about certain aspects of computers than I do. None-the-less, when there are computer problems at Silver Bay, or if people have questions about why their computer isn't doing what they expect, I'm usually the one who gets called for help.
During the summer of 1996, I started to design Silver Bay's web page, doing virtually all of the HTML programming myself. This web page can be viewed at Silver Bay's web site at http://www.silverbay.org
At the end of the summer season, the program office is no longer needed as the number and size of conferences dwindles to a trickle. At the end of the summer of 1996, I was placed in the position of working on a major database project for Silver Bay. This project involved creating a program in Microsoft Fox Pro that could handle the annual giving and membership database files, and provide an interface for these files for easy entry of new data and the querying of existing data. I started by spending time getting familiar with Fox Pro. I then spent about 4 and 1/2 weeks transferring the data from Microsoft File into Fox Pro, converting the data from its flat line form into a truly relational form. In doing so, we refined considerably what the final database files would look like. I then built a program around an existing sample that came with Fox Pro, with a variety of screens for interaction and input of data. When this was mostly complete, we had changed the makeup of the data files so much that most of the query writing had to be redone. Fortunately, this process was much faster than before, since I had learned a considerable amount about Fox Pro while developing the screens. By then, a considerable amount of time had passed since we had last transferred the data and when the input screens were finished, so we decided that it would be better to retransfer the data than to reenter all the changes made to the old data. We were able to begin using the new system by then, which was sometime in the early spring of 1997. I spent most of that summer comparing data in the new system with data in the old system and correcting differences. The database system still needed a lot of work, particularly with developing reports and refining the overall system. We attempted to make the system multi-user but ran into limitations with the Fox Pro system. I created a work-around that did what we needed. At least part of the system was still in use as of September 25, 2001.