Why this Blog

In the Beginning

After finishing school and further studies, I started working at a major steel manufacturer (ISCOR) in South Africa working in a main-frame environment mainly doing process control and reporting. It did not take me long to realize this was not for me. After about a year in this position I started my National Service (Army)  which was completed a year later. Due to contractual obligations, I returned to ISCOR but fortunately this time, in a different position.

Getting into Electronics

I've always had an interest in electronics and in my new position at ISCOR I've had plenty opportunities to do various projects. Some of the more interesting projects involved;

• Weld detection of a plate
• EBCDIC to ASCII printer interface
• Squash Court Light Control

These project gave me great opportunity to learn discrete electronics, micro processors and lastly assembler.  I've been in this position for almost ten years and then decided to move on.

Getting into Programming

A major concern to me was that one cannot make a living out of Electronics alone, especially not in South Africa. I've noted an increase in electronics designs which required interfacing to computers running custom software. I've started designing and writing this software and eventually found my new job and "hobby". After work I would go home and practice my "hobby", over weekends I would spend hours practicing my "hobby". I was hooked on my "hobby" and soon got fluent in,

• c and later c++
• Clarion
• Assembler (x86 and 8051)
• Pascal later Delphi
• GW Basic and later QBasic
• Visual Basic
• C#

Married Life

During these exciting "hobby" years of mine, I got married and my wife gave birth to our son Tertius. Soon I got into the situation where there was no time for my "hobby" and I had to get something else that we as a family could do, specially something for father and son.

Hobby

One of the best hobbies in the world is Photography. I bought two camera's, Cannon 5DII and Canon 500D for my son with a variety of top prime lenses.  Now that my son is a teenager, I also decided to get back into electronics specifically to expose him to it.

So Why This BLOG

To share all the interesting things we are doing with you and to also tell you how we have done it. We hope you will enjoy this with us and that you will also learn something from this BLOG.

Lastly, if your job is also your hobby.....you are doing something wrong!!