Drawing
I used to draw when I was young. Then in college (early 80’s), an amazing poster I saw (Le Guerrier Applique, by the late Belgian artist Luc Genot) made me redraw it, making me focus on drawing girl faces in pastel. All my drawings were stolen from me by mainly girls!
Caption: Le Guerrier Applique,
by Luc Genot.
Keyboard playing
From youth as well (used to have a Technics SX-K200), but with lengthy blackouts where I didn’t play for long weeks or even years. I now have a Yamaha PSR-A3000 that I try to steal time to refuge to.
Photography
Another hobby from youth (used to have a Pentax MX), and I kept this one alive! All photos in this website are by me. I now have a Canon EOS 80D; my next camera – when I get bored with the mechanical mirror – might be an EOS R, or EOS RP.
Coding for fun
I was privileged to have had access (credit to my dad) in the suburb of Damascus, Syria to a variety of “home computers” as they used to be called back in the late 70’s/early 80’s; like Texas Instruments TI‑99/4A, Commodore 64 & Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
While I, like others, had a main interest in games (and exchanged tons of them with peers on digital cassettes), I was curious enough to start simple mundane FORTRAN codes on my TI‑99/4A.
Fast forward to 1994, I coded my own personal (well, student) page in HTML to have my own page at USC’s website that year.The good old days of early internet, where the norm was for websites to have textured backgrounds. USC’s website background was light gray marble! Back then nobody knew what the “internet” was (no exaggeration, see the Today Show cast guessing what that is!).
Now in 2019, I’m using the WordPress platform with a theme from a developer to let you see this site (pssst, I still installed HTML code plug-ins, old habits die hard!).
At USC, I learned FORTRAN, C, C++ and Matlab just to use them to do BME class homework! The self-learning experience was fun and spoiling as it was done in Unix (yeah!) on real computers (Sun Microsystems’ SPARC stations). To today, I’m still to be impressed with a Windows or iOS computer! It didn’t happen and ain’t likely to happen.