My parents
bakerpublishing
Baker Publishing Employees
Baker family motto:
Strength through honour.
Because, although this is a family business this JavaScript package and timing system was written by me.
I am primarily an artist who works in oils, but some say I am not.
This is a brief outline of my educational background.
As we make our way through life we meet people and make an impression on them.
If we are honest, reliable, shifty, lazy or try to hide things, people make judgements about us whether we like it or not.
First year, 1961 Final year 1968.
School Motto:
Enter to learn, go forth to serve.
Translation, service before self.
Pongakawa means the Kawa of the Ponga, New Zealand's silver fern. Kawa is everything about something, especially the spirituality of it.
Translation: Don't judge a book by its cover, or don't think less of someone just because they forgot to brush their hair today, they may be better than you at some thing.
Being born in July, I had to wait an excruciating whole extra six months from my birthday before I could start in February the following year, at the age of five and a half.
We had a great little school at Pongakawa. Mrs Richardson was our teacher for the first year in primers 1 & 2, and taught us to read. Then Miss Johnson, Mr Alderson, Mr Williams; and finally Ron Bruce was our teacher for the last two years in both Forms 1 and 2.
I can give you the names of some of the students who worked with me, but it wouldn't be fair to name them until I have asked them first. Pongakawa had its 100th year celebration in 1991, so if you know any friends of former pupils, ask them why our school, in the middle of a rural (farming) community was so great.
1969- 71
School motto:
Sapiens Fortunum Fingit Sibi
This was the personal motto of Julius Caesar.
Translation: A quarryman watches his fingers or, a wise man controls his own destiny or, a wise man controls his own fortune.
From the third to the fifth form I attended Hamilton Boy's and boarded at the hostel Argyle House with 100 others.
Same deal, if you know anybody who was in 3L1 in 1969, ask them who they felt about it, or ask anyone who was in the hostel during those three years. I'll add some names after I've made contact with these kind folks.
1972-73
Motto: Plus Ultra (Aim high, Aim higher)
Some of the primary school friends from my early school years did the same as I did and returned for their final year or two years at Te Puke. Others had spent all five at the same secondary school, and we remained friends right through the sixth and seventh forms.
From 1977 (Easter) when I arrived by Greyhound bus from New York, after flying from London, until 1978 I hung out at this place with some great people who are still my friends. It was at that time an "alternative" educational institution, offering arts degrees, and had one of the 10 best computer systems available at any tertiary institution in the United States, with telephone modems linking consoles to a timeshare systen running a modified basic language mainframe, which you could check out for free and operate from home. I played a lot of Star Trek in my first few months there,and tried to learn the rudiments of the Basic programming language.
100 INPUT "STRING" ;A$
110 INPUT "NUMBER";A
120 PRINT"THE STRING AND THE NUMBER ARE";A$A
STRING? HX
NUMBER? 20
The people who run Radio MIXX96 Fm, John Foster, Toni Holm and Dave Rauh will remember me. Other people who were involved with the student newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal in those days, and computer people who were living on campus may also. One of them was Ben Woolf who helped me with a publication I edited. We used an xperimental optical charactar reader (OCR) which Boeing was just completing development of and tested one of two prototypes on campus to scan ordinary typed pages from an IBM Selectric with a special "golf ball" typing head with a delta character on it, which produced a "six level" punched tape which a computer at teh Daily Olympian newspaper used produce paper copy, as an alternative to the normal manual compugraphic machine paper copy.
I still hang out on a Star Trek Bulletin Board, Trek BBS @ http://www.trekbbs.com/; so drop in some time and chat (about Star Trek) if you feel like it.
Perhaps I shouldn't mention this because although I was finally accepted as an adult student, and began the Intermediate to a Bachelor of Architecture, something I had had my heart set on since the age of 12, I only lasted 6 months. I did study logic 101, Computing 101, Chinese Philosophy and Literature 101, and another couple of philosophy papers, but ran out of money unfortunately.
I did a basic CBC (Certificate of Business Computing) (which I did not complete) with an accountancy diploma attached in 1990. It was the same year my mother died, and the whole thing is a bit of a blur.
This was the year of the 80386 processor and the DOS-5 operating system. Processor speeds were climbing to an amazing 33 MHz and by the end of the year I owned one. 3.5 inch floppy discs appeared. Unfortunately my computer, a Unix from Taiwan with an Intel 80386 processor had a programme on it which searched for a 3.5 inch floppy disc, and after detecting one, only allowed me 12 months to install it before turning itself off permanently. I didn't have one but my friend who knows how to spell my name in the C language, copied a game called Gorilla from a 3.5 inch disc onto my 5.25 inch floppy, and sure enough the machine died. Verdict, it needed a new motherboard. This was the first year of the real PC if you want my opinion, although it took a few more years before processors got fast enough to run without additional cards, and before the internet became a really efficient tool in this country (New Zealand) at least
http://www.aimovie.com
http://www.alicebot.org