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My railroad information is organized into a top-level directory containing New England-wide information, and sub-directories for individual railroads: At the moment I only have Boston & Maine, Maine Central and New Haven information on-line.
I'm an ASCII sort of guy, and took a long break from the computer industry not long after my first major encounter with Micro$oft's Windows. Not to say that I thought much of DOS either (note: that was written about DOS 3.3, and every word is STILL TRUE of DOS 6). I still understand TCP pretty well, although I'm no longer economically constrained to write code for products of the "...never to be sufficiently damned Intel chipmakers..." My next-to-last networking job was at Sandstorm Enterprises Inc. , an information security tools developer. It was sold to a competitor; I worked out my contract and left just before the great MBTA disaster of 2015.
Because of Far Acres Farm , I own various pieces of farm machinery, including a relatively modern tractor, an antique tractor and two Gravely L8 7.6 horsepower walking tractors with various implements. I could probably get by on the home place with just one Gravely, except that they aren't big enough to chip trees and haul manure spreaders or logs.
I live off-grid - for most of the year, the electricity used by my house comes from a PhotoVoltaic power array and an inverter, with a battery bank for when the sun doesn't shine. A Thermomax evacuated-tube solar hot water collector provides a good deal of my hot water. More detail can be found in the write-up I did for the "Tour of Energy Independent Homes". I once owned a 4kW PV/battery/inverter power trailer , which I rented out to groups wanting quiet solar power for events and projects. You can find out a lot more about Alternative Energy in general at the Home Power Magazine web site.
I've been on the Internet for a long time (since before host names had dots in them), so I've left some debris behind, including two Internet RFCs:
I also collaborated on a couple more:
I maintained John Romkey's DOS Packet Driver Specification for a number of years. I was also a minor contributor to version 1 of the Windows Sockets API.
From its founding in January 1986 till 1991 or so, a great deal of what went on at FTP Software Inc. was at least partly my fault. After 1991, the company got bigger and more bureaucratized, until July 1993 when enough was enough.
After 1991, the things about FTP that were my fault got fewer and farther between. For example, while it is my fault that v1.10 of the Packet Driver Spec never saw the light of day, it is purely FTP's fault that they lost interest in the spec before transferring subsequent work (v1.11, at least) and the rights to Crynwr Software . When FTP Software vanished into Netmanage (a shareholder disaster if there ever was one, valuing FTP at less than it's cash on hand), I was finally free.
I learned to program (among other things) at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club . Once I got a picture taken at TMRC published on the cover of Railroad Model Craftsman magazine . While I was at MIT, and later when I was living in Boston and Cambridge, most of my modeling time was spent building hand-laid track for TMRC, and building/painting cars and locomotives for the Boston & Maine Railroad, in HO (1:87) scale. Since about 1990, I have a couple of 2' x 4' modules that I take to train shows as part of the Hub Division Modular Layout. I have an operational layout in my attic that I can attach the modules to as well. I spend much of my modeling time working on B&M 1950s passenger equipment and structures.
Recently I've been experimenting with high-resolution close-up photography of my models. These JPEGs are 600KB+, so they will be slow to download on a low-speed link.
I've spent some time making some family genealogical information machine-readable. I've got detailed data on about 1900 names going back into the 1700s. Some of my ancestors came from Sweden, some from the Netherlands, some from Scotland and some from England. I've got two views of my list on-line: The first is a complete list of all my names built with GED2WWW. The second only shows my direct ancestors and their children, built by Family Origins 9.0.
James VanBokkelen's Home Page / Far Acres Farm Inc. / jbvbRemove_This@jbvb.us
NOTE: Some e-mail providers, notably AOL, appear not to accept mail from me. If you don't get an answer, ask your provider if my address is blocked.
