David Powell LIBR500 dpwellyahoo.com

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David Powell LIBR-500dpwell_at_yahoo.com

• Hobbies and Passions

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My First Passion

• My first passion was classical music. I cant
  remember whether it was the music of Bach or
  Mozart that first entranced me, but there was a
  piece my mum used to play at the piano that I
  especially loved. It was by Bach, from the
  Well-Tempered Clavier. Heres the opening bar

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At the age of eight

• I started to learn the cello. I played till I was
  14, then took a year of guitar lessons.
• Heres a picture of Miss Cello and me at a
  slightly later age.

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The Trumpet

• In high school we had a band teacher who played a
  mean jazz trumpet.
• He got me interested in the trumpet, and I played
  in our school stage band.
• I quit the trumpet in first year university, but
  I often think about taking it up again. Im not
  sure if my neighbours would be impressed, though!

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Singing

• In my thirties I took up singing.
• I joined the Vancouver Cantata Singers in 1995.
  Heres a photo of us singing in a town called
  Erfurt, during our 1998 tour of Germany.
• I also sing in a barbershop quartet. We dont
  have an official name yet, but for the moment
  were calling ourselves the Footnotes.

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Computers a hobby

• In the last few years Ive become very interested
  in computers.
• One of the first things I learned was how to
  write html.
• Im currently webmaster for the Cantata Singers.
  Click the link to check out their website
• www.cantata.org

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Programming

• I have taught myself some basic web programming
  using a language called PERL
• PERL stands for Practical Extraction and Report
  Language, but its also known as the
  Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
• Its a great language for processing text and is
  one of the most commonly-used languages for
  internet programming. I used it last summer to
  create a web-based email form for the VCS
  website. This little snippet of code takes
  information from the email form and prepares it
  for sending to the email program
• read(STDIN, buffer, ENV'CONTENT_LENGTH')
• _at_pairs split(//, buffer)
• foreach pair (_at_pairs)
• (name, value) split(//, pair)
• value tr// /
• value s/(a-fA-F0-9a-fA-F0-9)/pack(
  "C", hex(1))/eg
• FORMname value

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Outdoor Stuff

• I love doing stuff in the mountains. I enjoy
  hiking, but Im particularly fond of skiing, both
  downhill and cross-country.
• On the left is the view from the Stubai glacier,
  not far from Innsbruck, where I spent a wonderful
  day in April, 1994.

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more glaciers.....

• I took a glacier travel course once. It was given
  on Mount Baker, in Washington State. We spent a
  weekend ice-climbing and pulling each other out
  of crevaces.

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My Current Passion

• At the back of my mind for many years was the
  thought that I would like to take up some kind of
  dancing.
• One day about 4 years ago I heard a guy on a bus
  telling a friend about...Swing Dancing!
• There are several forms of swing dancing. Theres
  the Balboa, the Shag, the Boogie Woogie, and
  more. My favorite these days is the Lindy Hop.

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The Lindy Hop

• The original Lindy Hop was actually Charles
  Lindberghs famous solo flight across the
  Atlantic in May, 1927.
• The dance that was all the rage at the time was
  named after it, and the name stuck.

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Swingout Northwest

• Theres a big swing dance camp held most years at
  Fort Warden in Washington State. It goes from
  Boxing Day to New Years Day. Its called
  Swingout Northwest
• Fort Warden is a former army base thats been
  converted into a conference center. I was at the
  last camp, which was in 2000, and Ill be going
  again this year. I cant wait!

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• THE END