Personal Stuff
 Despite that ridiculous hat, I can still catch fish. |
Despite that ridiculous hat, I can still catch fish. |
This is the Everything Else page. The page with links to things that interest me other than fishkeeping. My wife says that I have too many hobbies and I think she might be right (don't tell her that, though.) I have trouble sometimes maintaining each of my hobbies, but I try.
Eventually each of these main topics will have their own webpage if they don't already. I'll probably post more pics and such too.
Maybe this will help you understand what it is to be Paul Apgar.
I occasionally write a column for the newsletter at my work, called Food For Thought. It's supposed to be a humorous column about a chubby man's musings on food. Some people find it funny -- decide for yourself... I actually host archives for the column on this server.
It can be found here: Food For Thought.
I've been programming computer games on and off for a long long time. I think it may be my true calling, and it should probably be what I do for a living, but oh well. I have a bunch of games I wrote back in High School in QuickBasic and VisualBasic, maybe I'll post them here later.
I wrote a game in 2003 called ScudStopper, a remake of Missile Command but in 3D and written in a programming language called DarkBasic Pro.. I may end up rewriting it to improve the game and make it more playable, but for now it's pretty much a complete game.
In early 2004 I started working on a slow-burn project which is a tile-based RPG. Here's a design document with a screenshot.
Update Oct 2004: I had a game idea back in High School (12+ years ago) that I could make a Marble Madness game with a level editor. Well I never got very far in QBasic due to the limit on graphics and I didn't know much about isometric tiles. But now with DarkBasic I'm able to do this game in FULL 3D and also have ideas on how to make a level editor for the game. All thanks to learning some 3D methods for object merging, as well as having an awesome physics engine called Newton Game Dynamics which is wrapped to DBPro by Walaber. This is my current project so I am actively working on it. Here is the design document with screen shots.
I've always enjoyed grilling meat. In the past year I've gotten into "low and slow" barbecue with my weber bullet. A great fansite is www.virtualweberbullet.com. My barbecue page with pictoral accounts of some of my cooking can be found here.
I'm a novice gardener, but since I just bought a house last year that's understandable. I've only just begun, and already I'm driving my wife nuts!! I'm really into shade-loving Hostas, as well as fostering an unhealthy obsession with Azaleas.
In fact, due to my frugal nature I've decided to take a whack at propagating azalea cuttings by trying to root them in a small flat. So far, I've been having good results. Here's a picture of an azalea softwood cutting which actually took root!
Have any gardening problems? Go to GardenWeb.com, there are thousands of people out there that are expert gardeners. The "Name that Plant" forum is especially impressive... you get someone naming one of your mystery plants that you've never even seen before in about 5 minutes.
1Here's some poetry I wrote in college for a Poetry class. I received an "A" in the class but I don't know if that's for the quality of the poems themselves, or the fact that I turned everything in on time. It's easy to tell I miss my childhood from these mainly retrospective poems. Here are the best ones, and by "best" I mean the ones that received the most positive responses from my classmates and professor. A couple of them were published in the college literary publication, but you know how those are (cough) popularity contest (cough).
Mundane Maturity - Do you miss being a kid?
The Chess Pocket Manual (pub. 1896) - About, of all things, an old book I have.
Fijian Firewalkers - Another childhood anecdote from Fiji.
I used to be into Chess quite a bit. In fact, if you saw the row of chess books I have you'd think I was Kasparov's trainer or something. I haven't read them all, but I did read quite a few of them. At one point I was a USCF member provisionally rated at around 1500, which I think was accurate as I was an average club player in strength. I have a nice wooden chess set, I'm still waiting for find a nice board to match, or perhaps a chess table? That would be cool.
I also collect older chess books, as in anything published before 1950. The earlier the better. I don't buy them anymore as the "old chess book budget" has run out.
Related to Chess, I've been on and off playing some games of Go. Go is an ancient (4000 years old) Chinese board game where black and white chips are placed on a 19x19 grid one at a time. Pieces can be captured, or become invunerable, and the person who controls the most territory wins. If you saw it without knowing what it was you'd think it was some giant form of othello but it's nothing like that. It's actually quite intriguing and much more "dynamic" than chess is, since there are so many possiblities. In fact, they have yet to make a computer Go game that can beat a Go Master. But they've already got a few computers that can beat Kasparov in Chess!
 This is barely the tip of the iceberg. |
We go to yard sales, town fairs, and book sales in order to find some cheap books. It is one of the cheapest ways to have fun. We stay away from "half price" sales, and we turn our noses up at $1 per hardcover. Oh yes... we are all about the "Buck a Bag" principle, where you stuff as many books (hardcover, softcover, whatever) into a bag or box, and then pay $1-$2 for the whole thing. I love it, and you'll be amazed at what types of things you're interested in for around $0.05 a book.
Go to booksalefinder.com to find a book sale near you!
Paul: Chess, Fishkeeping, Gardening, Handyman, Computers, Poetry, Classic Literature, Art How-To, Science Fiction,
Deborah: Cookbooks, Physics, Medical, Decorating, Cats, Crafts
