Oak Bay High in 1963, again...

Yes, it really has been fifty years since we graduated in 1963 from Good Old Oak Bay High so it's time for our Reunion! Here's your chance to renew friendships and catch up on what's happened in our lives since graduation! So book those seat sales, use your Air Mile points, and write the weekend of June 21st, 2013, in your diaries!

Please have a look at the attached registration, fill it in and mail it back to Wayne Carson by March 31st, to be eligible for the Early Bird Draw. One lucky Grad will win a free registration!

Also, please email back any suggestions, concerns or queries and your committee will do its best to address them.

We hope everyone is as enthusiastic about this as we are. At the last Reunion there were 137 of us attending out of a graduating class of 268. We're hoping this Milestone 50th will be even bigger in numbers and even more fun than our 40th!

Barb Doell, Bob Hall, Cheryl Borris, Derek Hamlet, Donna Bishop, Doreen Falkner, Gayle Shepheard, Ian Whitbread, Judy Vaio, Linda Poyntz, Pat Daniel, Roger Pinfield, Sharon Henderson and Wayne Carson.

50 YEARS!

What?

It's been 50 years since the days of Chas, everybody. Good old Ian Whitbread and good old Bob Hall already have wheels under a 50 year reunion for next year, 2013. Bob has laboured mightily and has nailed down a huge number of us. His results are astonishing. (A fascinating detail is that almost all of us are email users and, not only that, a like number has PayPal accounts.) There has been an issue with getting out the emails to us, however; and if you are, as was your webmaster until recently, without emails from Bob Hall about the reunion, then send along your email address to one of the email addresses on this page and it will be forwarded at once to Ian or Bob.

Pat Daniel's Reunion Logo .

-Pat Daniel's logo.

This site has well over a hundred pages and each page has several screens of text and pictures. Press the buttons at the top and bottom of each page to step through them or click on the "Index" button, go to the Index, click on a letter of any of those alphabets, scroll down and click on an entry to jump straight to that entry. Leap a hundred screens in a single bound!

At the beginning of March, 2013, the O.B.H.S. 1963 site began closing in on a gigabyte of photographs and text, nigh a gigabyte of memories. How many high school classes can make that claim about their website?

We're not stopping there. Bob Hall has recently created a project to put the arm on alumni to send in biographies. We will be adding still more pages as bios from Bob's project roll in.

Bob Hall's Biography Project

Maureen Fanthorpe, see below, has just written, 02 May. She has included photographs, one of which was 11 megabytes in size. It came down the pipe just fine so we can be sure that size does not matter. Don't be concerned about large attachments to emails (10 megabytes is regarded as the common sense limit). The email accounts are working fine here.

We have Bob Hall's new Biography Pages up. Our valedictorian is leading us off himself. Click on the "Bob Hall's Biography Project" heading, just above, and zip straight over there to read Bob's bio. and to see Bob in a magnificent G. and S. costume.

Music! Bob has sent along grand material from a Gilbert and Sullivan performance the quality of which will astonish. Listen for instance, to the chorus and ask yourself if Mr. D'Oyly Carte would not have been delighted to have booked them for the Savoy! Listen to Josephine, Buttercup and our own, our very own, Ralph Rackstraw honour the grand tradition of G. and S.

Dave Alton has written a fine biography and it is now in Bob's Biography project.

Bill Bell, as you will recall, has had his own biography page up since 2003, nine years. He has just written, too, and his special page has been updated with pictures from the South Seas. How many of you have been to the ham radio operators' dx favorite, Pitcairn Island? Find Bill's page in the Index or in the Table of Contents. Use the buttons at the tops of the pages.

Maureen Fanthorpe has responded to Bob and we have her biography up now, too. Maureen has contributed professionally made, very high quality, action photographs of her Australian Cattle Dogs performing. Those you have to see!

Wendy Stevens has sent in her bio.

Brian Lees has sent along his bio. now, too.

Swannie Larsen's biography is up now. Many thanks, Swannie, especially for including great photographs! Swannie has been charming Prince Edward. We expected no less, of course. Have a look...

Len McNeely is aboard now, too!

Bonnie-Jane Lowman has send pix and a great bio.

Tim Ackerman has written (20130121) sending along a superb photograph of the West Coast woods along with a photograph of his wife, Jill, and himself. We have a bio up now, too.

Norman Abbott has written (20130227) sending along three portraits and a great bio and...a promise of music!

David Niven, a marine engineer, is now, er, aboard. David just can't retire! Have a read.

Rick Ackerman has arrived on the site and by zip line! Have a look.

Hilary Ford now has a really grand bio up. She has sent along pictures documenting the years.

       Les Litwin is abaord.

       Murray Farmer is aboard.

       Peter Baines has sent along his biography and that included a stint in the Mounties.

Your bio? Where is that?

Quilting Project, Judy and Cheryl

Judy Vaio and Cheryl Borris have undertaken a quilting project and are recruiting girls to assist. Two quilts will be made. Each will have its own spec. One quilt is an art quilt and the second is an appliqué quilt that will have "painted threads and other techniques."

The girls write: If you are a quilter or fabric artist and wish to participate, please contact Judy Vaio Chamberlain at ___ or Cheryl Borris at ___, who will co-chair this committee. Please state where you live and which quilt you wish to work on. Thank you.

(Email addresses have not been put in to prevent the bots from harvesting them. This way the girls will be relieved of spam. Respond through your webmaster using the email addresses furnished on this site. You will be put into direct touch with the girls.)

We await photographs of the impresarios! In the meantime, make do with this website's author.

Your elderly webmaster urges you, yet again, to send along material to keep your website alive. Come on now, you guys and girls out there must have photographs and recollections of the times. If nothing else, please send along contemporary photographs of yourselves and family. Elsewhere on the site and for the last 12 years, there has been the same exhortation. Don't be concerned about the appearance of the old prints. Scan them anyway and send them along; faded, cracked, stained; whatever.

Look at the class of work that is done here with G.I.M.P. (General Image Manipulation Program, born at Berkeley, 1996) , the open source graphics program used on the Linux work station here:

Come on you guys. What have you been doing out there? The world in which we elderly grew up is evaporating around us plenty fast.

Three years ago now your webmaster scratched a long time itch by "getting into" microcomputers. It's only since the 8080 came out that that has been a priority, mind you! That and reading Pepys' Diary. Old Sam's eyes have failed. His diary was one of those things to be "got around to". It's one of the treasures that we inhierit as native speakers of English. Read Pepys' Diary.

Those of you equally nerdy owe it to yourselves to explore the Arduino microcontrollers. The more powerful versions of the boards include multiple serial ports, a two wire port, a serial to u.s.b. interface built in, many analogue inputs, bi-directional one bit i/o, built in p.w.m. function, two built in interrupts and even eeprom. It has everything one can think of. The little devils are powerful and require no messing about with peripheral chips. The one bit i/o will even drive 40mA loads so even those don't have to be interfaced. Everything is right on the die. The full dress version, the Arduino Mega, built around the Mega 1280 chip (now upgraded to the 2560 processor), is in operation in the boiler room of this building tracking everything that is going on in the two boilers and their peripherals. It does data reduction, saves some data right in its own eeprom and sends its data to a p.c. where the data are displayed on a spreadsheet. A whole series of graphs is presented there for use by the building's manager, a Stationary Engineer. Real time and historical data are provided. An early version of one of the charts appears below. Now to get on with interfacing the vehicle door on the secure parking area, the door to the boiler room, the elevator...

Writing the system has been a gas because it has forced the learning a bit of C and C++. Doing that with the blunt tool of a brain our age has been an "experience" and well worth the effort.

dhwOutputTemperature = log(((10240000/dhwOutputTemperature) - 10000)); //Apply the Steinhart-Hart formula

dhwOutputTemperature = 1 / (0.001129148 + (0.000234125 * dhwOutputTemperature) + (0.0000000876741 * dhwOutputTemperature * dhwOutputTemperature * dhwOutputTemperature));

dhwOutputTemperature = dhwOutputTemperature - 273.15; // Convert Kelvin to Celsius

if ((dhwOutputTemperature > dhwOutputTemperatureHighSet) || (dhwOutputTemperature < dhwOutputTemperatureLowSet)) {

Look at that. Now brew your own C code. It can be done with the fusty old meatware that we are condemned to use. The source code for the boiler room system now runs to 1,400 lines and the compiled code is about 14k. With an Arduino or a p.i.c. micro. a fellow can do about anything and without elaborate hardware.

Now, what have you guys been doing with your old meatware? You must be doing something with it. Send along some material and photographs.

Press a button anytime, top or bottom, to move on into the site and to see pix from fifty years and more ago.

For those of you out there who are hamateurs, remember that you qualify for the Q.C.W.A. It's a pleasure to go to a meeting and chat with fellows who sling their own solder, remember "the seven circuits", the 80% on every section or fail and who passed the real radio operators' exams. Try it; support "The Old Man".

That's N0NBH's widget up there, chaps. That's live data on access. The time is the time of last data update. Force a page refresh for the latest data and a random wavelength of the sun.

To skip on into all the photographs of O.B.H.S. back in the 'sixties, use the buttons top and bottom.

I.I.S., which it must be said had served well indeed for two years, has been supplanted by Apache. Apache is the h.t.t.p. web server originally written for use with Linux and sweet it is. It is a well thought out, flexible and potent open source program. There is not a bell or a whistle which this item of freeware does not have. It's spectacular.

If you should have any difficulty with the new pages, please advise your webmaster and server wrangler.

Linux has been in use here for several years. Nonetheless, an antique box has been prodded into life to permit using the old, original web site composing software that was in use to make the original site. KompoZer is also in use. That's another item of freeware that does a superb job. Everything should fit together from 1999 to 2013. "Should..." If it doesn't, then strength will be drawn from the old cubicleland mantra: "If it were easy it wouldn't be fun."

Standy by. Face toward Vancouver. Watch for smoke. See what smokes first; museum piece hardware, creaking old operating system long abandoned by Mr Bill, applications program old enough to vote or...webmaster!

When you are looking for software, start with the SourceForge site. The open source backup program is in use here and does a fine job.

There's no need to linger out here on the front porch. Press the Index or T.o.C. (Table of Contents) button at the top of the page to move on into the site.

Can you hear yourself saying: "Who the hell are these guys. All these guys are somebody's grandfather.

The 1963 tribe gathers once again. This is dinner for the class of 1963 before the O.B.H.S.' 75 year dance.