User:Awcolley
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Welcome to the userpage of Tony Colley, a member of the Wikipedia community since September 22, 2005.
Personal Information
I currently live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, having moved here in 2000. Previous residences include Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. My family and I enjoy the smaller city environment here, especially after seven years fighting traffic in the Philadelphia area. We are also glad to be closer to both of our extended families... and especially glad to be nearer our two new grandchildren, who live in Chelsea, Michigan.
Hobbies and Interests
Website Development
You are welcome to visit my family website. It and internal websites I have set up for my current and previous employers are primarily based on the PHP-based content management system TikiWiki.
I also maintain the website for the Algonquian Confederacy of the Quinnipiac Tribal Council, an association dedicated to the history and culture of the aboriginal peoples of the North American region now known as Connecticut. That website uses PHP that I've written.
Geneaology
Living near one of the U.S.'s largest collections of genealogical materials (print, microfilm, and microfiche) unaffiliated with the Mormon's Family History Library, the Fred J. Reynolds Historical Genealogy Department of the Allen County Public Library, is an amateur genealogist's dream come true. Still, most of the genealogical information I have gathered is a compilation of the work of other amateur genealogists in my family tree, many of whom I found or found me through online searches.
Most of the data I've gathered can be accessed online at my website. A good starting point would be my index of surnames.
Meteorology
I have loved observing and studying the weather since I was a child. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, gave me plenty of opportunity to run to the basement many spring and summer nights as the tornado sirens sounded! Twice I have had the opportunity to witness a live tornado; both times, fortunately, from a safe distance! The first time was during my senior year in high school, on the infamous afternoon of April 3, 1974, when I peered out the second-floor windows at home and watched a massive tornado (nearly half a mile wide as I watched it) pass less than five miles north of our home in Louisville, Kentucky (see this blog entry for more detail and some old pictures). The second time was nearly two decades later, when I watched the Castle Rock, Colorado, tornado (in 1991 or 1992) from the office building where I worked, nearly 10 miles north of the tornado's path.
My interest in meteorology led me all the way to a M.S. degree in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. Life has it's way of leading you down paths you never expected, however, and my profession of umpteen years has been software engineering. Still, I have the heart of a meteorologist. My WeatherBlog chronicles interesting weather events in the Fort Wayne area, and I post the current conditions (updated every 5 minutes) and archived data from my private weather station on my website, at the Weather Underground, and at the Citizen Weather Observer Program.
Photography
I love taking photographs, primarily nature photography. Although I did have a small developing kit and contact printer as a teen, I never quite had the resources to put together my own darkroom. Scans of some of my photographs (including the sample on this page) are posted on my website, as are a few digital photos.
As of January 2006, I have at least 20 years worth of negatives that I'm in the process of scanning, I hope to post many of my favorites online as that effort progresses. Also that month, I finally replaced my trusty old 35mm Minolta X-700 with a digital SLR, so I hope to start posting higher quality (at least technically, if not compositionally) photos online soon.
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Professional Career
As I just mentioned, I have been a programmer / software engineer for nearly three decades... since back in the days of punched tape and punch cards, the late '70s. I began in 1976 with college courses on BASIC, Fortran, and APL. As an undergrad, I wrote programs (in all three languages) for the Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science Departments at the University of Louisville. As a graduate student at CSU, I developed programs in Fortran and actually wrote some of the earliest code for processing geostationary weather satellite imagery and analyzing it on special purpose hardware developed by the Electrical Engineering department at CSU. I gradually became more interested (professionally) in computer programming, particularly the up and coming field of image processing. I attended (thanks to CSU) a couple of the early SIGGRAPH conferences, and decided to leave atmospheric science and pursue the fields of computer graphics and image processing in the "real" world.
Since 1980, I have worked at:
- Lockheed Missiles & Space in Sunnyvale, CA
- Ford Aerospace Western Development Lab in Palo Alto, CA
- Gould (Deanza) Imaging & Graphics Division in San Jose, CA
- The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (later became Veridian and now part of General Dynamics)
- Geodynamics Corporation in Englewood, CO, acquired by Logicon, acquired by Northrop Grumman – while there I was subcontracted to:
- Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO
- Martin Marietta Management & Data Systems in King of Prussia, PA, merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin
- ITT Aerospace & Communications Division in Fort Wayne, IN
- Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, Advanced Decision Systems Technology Center in Fort Wayne, IN
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Portions of this userpage inspired by: User:Trevor_macinnis
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