Hi! I'm George A. Theall. Welcome to my home on the net. My interests include:
The big love of my life (apart from Linda and my kids Amanda and George Peter) is cycling. I own several bikes and race for Portland Velo Club as a Masters 55+ rider, although these days most of my riding involves local training rides.
Back in '96, my wife Linda bought me one of those kits for making beer. I was never one to go overboard with beer, but something about making my own beer appealed to me.
I also have an interest in working with other fermentables. For example, I took advantage of a college reunion in Vermont to start a hard cider and have been making mead. The work is easier than with beer typically, but fermentation takes months! I've also taken up beekeeping as a hobby, in part I suppose to help ensure a ready supply of honey for my meads.
I have done quite a bit of programming, everything from Fortran, C and Pascal under DOS to AWK, Perl, PHP, and Python, primarily under some flavour of *nix. Some of my work is available as part of the homepage for TifaWARE.
Ages ago, I spent a wonderful year in Salamanca, northwest of Madrid, learning how to speak the language. It's a fantastic place, and the people are warm and friendly. At the time, I hoped to become an interpreter, and while I returned with nary the trace of an accent, I did come to understand that those born into a Spanish-speaking family held a lead I could never surpass when it came to instantaneous interpretation.