Personal Interests

References to Web resources related to personal (as opposed to professional or general) interests.

Outline of major topics in this category

This is an outline of these sections. A few are big enough to have their own page, some are just in here lower down...

• Cartography
• Travel and Tourism info on the Web
• Recreational
  • Real-time, Real-space Live Action Roleplaying
  • Hiking and camping
  • Railroading, model- and -fan
  • Entertainment
• Genealogy
• Computers
• Space ("The Final Frontier")
• Telephony
• Miscellaneous

Cartography

Travel and Tourism info on the Web

Recreational

Real-time, Real-space Live Action Roleplaying

Hiking and camping

My Hiking and Camping section, being mostly about volunteer run groups was full of pointers that seem to have failed. I have resurrected a few, but could use a bunch more.

The Appalachian Mountain Club is the primary outdoors group in this area, but they concentrate on the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The Green Mountain Club is more local. I also enjoy hiking in the Shenandoah's (from road along the ridge, so you hike backwards to most trails, you start going downhill and return going up hill), this area is covered by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. GORP -- Great Outdoor Recreation Pages has useful information for seeing the great outdoors all across America.

Railroading, model- and -fan

I'm both a model railroader and railfan. I was a member of TMRC from 1973 through the early 90's where I worked on a lot of the early computerization. As with hiking and camping, most of the references here were lost to attrition as the volunteers that hosted them moved on. I also have pointers on my Tourism page for Amtrak, the MBTA, and others.

There's a local, well eastern Mass., collaboration for having model RR open houses all on the same weekend called Tour de Chooch that's interesting if you're local.

Entertainment

Genealogy

There was a lot of activity putting genealogy data and people together on the net, but I've mostly lost contact with those efforts and all the old pointers have gone bad. Hopefully, some day I'll get back to this and find relevant resources to put here.

One extensive branch of my family is old New England families, and since I also live in the Boston area, the NEGHS is a useful resource (although the pages on-line don't have any research info).

Some government resources for genealogy include U. S. Bureau of the Census and the National Archives (which included a section specifically on genealogy, but they re-orged and I haven't had the time to find it again). One particularly interesting resource is the Census's tabulation of name frequency in the census data.

Although I used to use a home brew system for managing my data, I expect to switch to LifeLines when I get the proverbial Round Tuit.

And there's always what Ambrose Bierce had to say about genealogy in his The Devil's Dictionary.

Computers

Space ("The Final Frontier")

I'm a general space enthusiast and had collected a lot of pointers to interesting resources on the early net. But, most of that data has suffered attrition, so there's only a little left here. Someday — when I find my round tuit, I used to have one around here, somewhere — I should get back to filling out this section...

The Space Telescope Science Institute has lots of pictures of their observations (as well as a few of the Hubble, itself).

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Copyright © MMXXIV Michael A. Patton

And finally, a random note:
There are three kinds of people. Those who can count, and those who can't.