Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks for your comments, Andrew. As an old guy, I am always enlightened by comments like "when I went down the turntable rabbit hole"... my earliest music memories are of my parents' "hi fi", which was a beautiful wooden cabinet about the size of two 2-drawer filing cabinets sitting beside each other. On the left was a door about 20cm wide which hid the controls - volume, source, tuning, and the tuning display (I don't recall if the radio was AM only or had FM as well) at the top and an empty space below where records could be stored vertically (room for all of about 20 records). On the right were the top drawer, containing a 45rpm automatic changer; the middle drawer, containing a 16/33/78 automatic changer; and the single big speaker at the bottom. With the 16/33/78 changer, it was important to rotate a lever around the bottom of the cartridge to select either the LP or 78 stylus. Yes it was mono. But I still have a couple of old 45s that I used to play on it when my dad wasn't home (he never did like that newfangled 60s music).
Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway yes would-be turntable purchasers, you really do need a "phono pre-amp", both to reverse the equalization applied during the recording process and to amplify the very low-level signals from the cartridge. If you tend to buy mostly new vinyl or even used stuff from the 60s through the present, most likely this will be stereo and most likely it will require the RIAA standard equalization. On the other hand, if you get interested in collecting old mono and 78s, then you need something a bit more flexible (for example, a company called Rek-O-Cut makes phono pre-amplifiers with variable equalization).
Thanks for the comment, Magnus. It is a pretty fine project! I hope that the contribution works out.