Update! I cannot recommend this project any longer, they have a new engine that I find unworkable, so I've gone back to the screensaver with the intertwining pipes and the occasional teapot. It's been a fun five years, but so long, SETI!
|
Hi! I'm Alan Turner, arturner@well.sf.ca.us. I'm a horticulturist and a landscape architect by training. If you live, work, shop or play in the Philadelphia area or any part of New Jersey, there's a good chance you do some of that in a project that I worked on in some role or another. I also spent some time in upstate New York and South Korea. Some years ago, I became an industrial electrician building control panels . It's interesting work, getting paid to play with industrial Lego. More recently, I've returned to design. Since not many industrial electricians crosstrain on 3-D drafting (or vice versa), I got to work on parts (tiny parts) of the Ford class of nuclear aircraft carriers and the Zumwalt class of destroyers. People will serve on those ships whose grandparents are just being born, which is humbling to say the least. Lately I'm back to more architectural types of design, currently furniture. Very cool custom furniture. Somehow I got into this computer stuff along the way. My main hangout online is The WeLL, one of the first virtual communities, where I hosted the New York, design, gardening, Philadelphia, and archives conferences. But I pared back in June of 1997, and now I just host gardening and one for people with disabilities (since I have the ADAAG pretty much memorized from my architectural work), and a couple of experimental conferences. Is fun. |
|
|
Some memorable Litecraft fixtures I got. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
My cedar compost bin design. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
I have my
|
|
|
Make your own
|
|
|
My
Campari jelly recipe. This is a fruit pectin jelly, not a
gelatin. Yes, I know much of the world calls gelatins jellies. |
|
|
My favorite plants are
heaths and heathers. |
|
If you can't grow or don't care for heaths and heathers,
you can still
plant lots of bulbs. Here's the easy way to do it. |
|
The Perfect
Skyscraper. An essay on Hancock place, Boston. |
|
Engineering and Illusion. The structure of Frank Lloyd Wright's
Fallingwater. |
|
The ACME market
in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania. A classic postwar supermarket. |
|
To paraphrase Bob Geldof: Just
buy the fucking
DVD. Live Aid was an amazing concert and with that many acts on
the bill there is sure to be something you'll like. And the money
still goes to a good cause, too. |
|
FREE Music Downloads My collection of free and legal sites for
downloading music, with an emphasis on sources for live performances. |
|
Medicocre poems are easy, but it's difficult to write
really bad
poems. Here are some of mine, and some others from friends. |
|
I've done some ascii and graphic banners for various
conferences on and off The WeLL. Here are a few of the
graphic
banners. |
|
I like
the clothespin bag. |
|
On special occasions, I make edible
Pikachus. |
|
Along the same lines, check out my Pikachu
Creche. |
|
One of my hobbies is playing with lasers. The Analog Laser
Projector. |
|
My contribution to the
Spacebrothers project. |
|
Usually I cut my hair
every two years. Here's
why. |
|
Take my Airphoto
tour. I thought it would be interesting to do a sort of a bio with
commentary in Terraserver links. |
|
Caught in the Web, a short essay I wrote in 1995 when this web
thing
really started to catch on. Unfortunately, most of the links suffer from
bit-rot now. |
|
Index
Librorum Liberorum. That Kelvin guy sure comes up with some interesting
stuff. |
|
Do you have a screensaver on your computer? Why not put
that computing power to work? SETI
(The Search For
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) can use your unneeded CPU cycles to
analyze some of the data from the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
GO
Team WeLL!
|
Update! I cannot recommend this project any longer, they have a new engine that I find unworkable, so I've gone back to the screensaver with the intertwining pipes and the occasional teapot. It's been a fun five years, but so long, SETI!
|
The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades. I taught AutoCAD there
during a regular faculty member's
sabbatical semester, and would hire any of their
graduates in a heartbeat. |
The WELL presents the State of the World Conference
This is another project I was involved in: The Gorbachev Foundation's
State of the World Forum. I did some of the web pages and moderated one of
the online discussions. (Whoops, that link is gone. So long, Gorby.) |
The
Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine is one of the wonders of
Manhattan. If you're visiting New York, blow off one of the regular tourist
sights, and see this instead. There is something wonderful about the very
idea of the last and largest gothic cathedrals in the world being just
around the corner from the diner in Sinefield. If you can't visit in person,
there's a virtual tour, too. |
The Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide. I couldn't believe
how pervasive this problem is! |
|
Howard Rheingold is the Elvis of Cyberspace. His pages change often, and
there's always something unusual or thought-provoking. Check out his book
Tools For Thought, I converted it to html. It's a
great read. |
|
Ripple. An interesting analysis of a classic Grateful Dead
song. |
|
Longwood Gardens is just a few minutes from where I live. I think that
part of the reason I became a landscape architect is because my parents took
me here so often when I was a kid. |
The
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
| The
Wollemi pine is an unusual tree, previously known only through
fossils. Now that it's being propagated, you can sign up to get one of
your own. |
|