John Annen's Homepage
poor, neglected homepage. Please feel free to look around, and to let me know what you think.Contents
Dry and Boring Personal Information
Hi. My name is John. It's great to have you here. Sorry the place is such a mess, but I just threw this page together to have something up and running. Perhaps one day I'll actually make it pretty.
I am a US citizen, currently working for a financial institution in Zurich, Switzerland. My hobbies include aviation (mostly the simulated variety), reading, writing and riding my bicycle. You can read more about my work and my hobbies below. You will also find throughout this site links to some of my favorite Web sites.
Aviation
I have loved aviation since childhood. You can still find me from time to time at one of any number of airports, just watching the planes and other goings on. Before I left Seattle in early December, 1998, I finished up ground school for my Private Pilot Certificate and passed my FAA written test. If you are interested in becoming a pilot, take a look at the Student Pilot Network Web site. It really is a helpful place. Landings and AVWeb are also excellent sites to learn about real-world flying.
I got my introduction to flight simming as a 14-year old high school student, using the original BAO Flight Simulator, which has evolved quite a bit and is now known as Microsoft Flight Simulator. If you are into flight simming, or would like to be, there are lots of wonderful sites on the Internet where you can download add-ons, check out the latest news and product reviews, and communicate with other simmers from around the world. For starters, you can visit AVSIM and Flightsim.com.
Although there are many amazing freeware and payware accessories for MS Flight Simulator, by far my favorites are Squawkbox and Pro Controller. Both are freeware. Together they provide realistic, Internet-based, real time air traffic control for MS Flight Simulator.
The air traffic control network of servers that I use with Squawkbox and Pro Controller is known as SATSERV. In order to use SATSERV, you have to be registered with the Simulated Air Traffic Controllers Organization, SATCO, or the International Simulator Pilots Association, ISPA. I have been a member of SATCO since January, 1998. SATCO is organized into geographic regions, which are in turn divided into smaller areas. SATCO members train and certify the controllers, and provide administrative oversight of all the ATC -- all on a volunteer basis! I am assigned to the Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center, which is within the Western Region of the SATCO USA division. I am rated as an Instructor 3, and hold the position of SATUSA Chief Instructor for the Seattle ARTCC. If you are a user of Squawkbox, come fly Seattle! If you go to our home page first, you can check out our arrival, departure and approach procedures and download some related charts.
Reading
I must admit that until I moved to Switzerland, I haven't been much of a reader of fiction. I am now finding more time to read, mostly because I commute by train, bus, tram and bike rather than car. I have found a great site, called Memoware, from which one can download out of copyright books formatted for the Palm Pilot. As my Palm Pilot goes everywhere with me, I always have my current book handy. I just finished rereading The Hobbit and have started on The Lord of the Rings, both printed on real, old-fashioned paper! Despite never having read consistently, I have over the years managed to read quite a few good books, including John Varley's Millenium (the book was many times the quality of the movie), all four of the volumes in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Trilogy and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is my favorite of them all. Not surprisingly, I have also read many books about flying, including Flying the Big Jets and Crisis in the Cockpit by Stanley Stewart. I can recommend highly all of the books that I have named above.
Writing
Over the years, my serious attempts at writing have, unfortunately, been few and far between. To my credit, I have co-authored with my friend Brett Bakke one Role-playing Gamers Association sanctioned tournament, For the Love of Freedom. (See below for more information on my gaming past.) I am also proud to have co-authored with Professor Richard Neidinger of Davidson College the article "The Road to Chaos Is Filled with Polynomial Curves," which appeared in the October, 1996 edition of The American Mathematical Monthly. It is with somewhat less pride that I confess to have written some rather mediocre poetry and just plain bad poetry.
When I first arrived in Switzerland, I caught anew the writing bug, but unfortunately, my writing time disappeared as my work hours increased.
Bicycling
By no means am I a rabid cyclist, nor am I anything approaching a psycho-fitness buff. I do, however, enjoy getting on my 1996 Kona Lava Dome and peddling through and around the streets, parks and cobblestone parking lots of Zurich. I commute to work on my bike regularly, when the weather is not awfully bad, and I have taken a few day trips across the beautiful Swiss countryside.
Travel
Zurich is a great jumping off spot for travelling around Europe. Since I arrived, I have been to The Netherlands (Amsterdam and Haarlem), Hanover, London (many times), Lucern (my favorite Swiss place to visit, so far), and Stockholm (which is an absolutely wonderful place with fantastic people!), to name a few. I'm planning a trip to Greece and Italy for later on this year.
Photography
I have always enjoyed taking pictures, but I have never had much talent for it. Recently, I bought a slightly used but rather nice Cannon camera, and am trying to learn how to use it. Most of my subjects are aircraft, but I also have taken a few pictures during my travels around Switzerland and the rest of Europe.
Role-playing
I started Role-playing at about ten-years old, when my then best friend and neighbor received the brand new Dungeons and Dragons game. I haven't been an active role-player in several years, but I have made many lasting friendships through role-playing, and through my membership in the Role-playing Gamers Association and its member club, the Atlantic Region Convention Fellowship. I dearly miss all of the wonderful people I used to see while attending gaming conventions, but now only correspond with via email.
EMS and Rescue
This is another hobby that played a big part in my life, but in which I am not currently active. I have ten years of mostly volunteer field experience as an Emergency Medical Technician and Rescue Technician in the State of North Carolina. I cannot hope to describe nor even can I pretend to fathom the intricate ways in which my emergency services experiences have shaped me as a person. An author with ten-fold my eloquence could not convey in all required detail what it means to be invited into someone's home at their most terrible moment of crisis and to have them place their hope in you, nor how it feels to be awakened by a blaring alarm and a rush of Adrenaline at three on a snowy morning to brave ice-covered streets only to find that the six-car pile up was a figment of the reporting caller's imagination. The work can be boring, frustrating, and exhausting, sometimes all in the same shift, and the monetary rewards are small to nonexistent, but if you really want to learn to believe in yourself, and to come to understand people at their best and at their worst, then I know of nothing that can compare to emergency services work.
One of the greatest benefits of my time in the streets, was the opportunity to meet and work with some of the finest, most dedicated and least selfish people who have ever seen a sunrise. I would like to take this chance to thank all of my teachers, partners, bosses, colleagues and most of all friends with whom I worked and served at the Davidson Emergency Rescue Service, Char-Meck Ambulance Services, the North Mecklenburg Volunteer Rescue Squad and the Winston-Salem Rescue Squad. I miss you all!
As I already noted, I am currently working as a contract UNIX system administrator for a bank in Zurich, Switzerland. I have been doing network and system administration on UNIX, VMS and other operating systems since the late eighties. I also have experience in training, project management, user support at various levels and several other aspects of the information technology industry. For a more detailed view of my professional background, you can take a look at my CV.
Biographical Information
So you haven't had enough of me, yet? You truly are of a hardy and bent sort!
Height: 5'10" Weight: 180 lbs. (last time I weighed myself, which was a while ago)
Hair: Brown Eyes: 2, both blue. (As time progresses, hair and eyes may swap attributes. J )
Born: 1967 in Lubbock, Texas, USA
Also lived in: London, England; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Charlotte (well close to it) and Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Athens, Georgia; and Seattle Washington
Marital Status: Very single, and given my rotten history with women, expecting to stay that way for a while, but that's a whole other Web site unto itself
Favorite Cuisine: Almost everything, but I guess if I had to pick, I would choose Thai
Favorite Movies: Anything with Cary Grant, Tony Curtis or Sean Connery
Last Book Read: The Hobbit
Philosophy, Politics, Religion, etc: Do you really want to go there?
I am grossly opinionated, with said opinions rooted fast in my own personal morality. Furthermore, I feel little need to reconcile my opinions with those of anyone or everyone else. I hold strongly to the belief that the living souls of this planet are what make this world special. I believe that people attach far too much importance to political, geographic and even cultural similarities and differences. As I age, I become more and more of a pacifist. I have come to realize that the many forms in which violence is perpetrated on the inhabitants of this planet can hold no betterment of any one person or group, and only serve permanently to stain our collective minds and souls with the blood of our own sisters and brothers. I am steadfastly honest, and believe with all my heart that a lie told to save a heartache profanes the heart's own ideal purity.
In the first draft of this page, I had included some more concrete thoughts on a couple of the political issues of our time, accompanied by a somewhat-relevant allegory excerpted from some as yet unwritten work. I cut the concrete thoughts during the editing process, but the allegory remains, below. I hope that those of you who bother to read it find it at least slightly enjoyable. It needs work, but I'll leave it as is for now, all the same.
… Today's ceremony was pathetic in comparison to the one that I had attended in the same place all those years ago. The new preacher had his heart and bible in the right places, but he lacked the passion that Father Abraham had shown when the other one had passed. As with all such ceremonies, this one marked its proper end, and I set out to walk the seven miles from the cemetery back to Mary's house. I chose not to follow the main highway, tracing instead my own footprints left years ago along the brook's rustic path. The Autumn winds had carried away all but a few of the highest and most feeble clouds, exposing the Sun's intention either to invite me into its unseasonable warmth, or to mock the solemn rite from which I was departing. I was still attempting to discern the light's true purpose, when I rounded Miller's bend, arriving inevitably at the splintered remains of the tattered but operating old mill. During my earlier hikes along the brook, I had befriended the stately proprietor of the mill. Erwin, as my friend called himself, always presented me with some pearl of wisdom that he had liberated from the oyster of daily busyness. Feeling this place again brought back to my ears Erwin's proud, rough voice, which even in the days I knew it, still hinted that his youth was spent in the valleys of the Scottish Highlands. The finer points of mill business are now even more lost on me than they were when Erwin first related them, but I do recall quite distinctly how he made many times a point of the toughness of the wheat grown here.
"'Tis a tough grain indeed that the farmers of this valley grow. Come year in and year out, the harvest puts our little mill to the test. But this humble mill was built equal to the toughest yield and the mightiest gale this valley will ever feel, and then again as strong, so that the bread made from its flour will continue to be the most sustaining of any that you would ever find baked here or abroad."
As I arrived at the foot of the rotten wooden panels that the mill-men still held for walls, I could see through the many voids that now completed the mill's surface four tall, stout figures, still working away at grinding those hearty kernels to dust. None of the four seemed to detect the rustling of the leaves under my feet over the tune of self-mockery whistled by the walls as they passed the winds into what was still Erwin's hope, although the kindly miller himself was now and for ten years past too much dust to hold it. Each gust and draft in turn claimed its due portion, whisking it off to the lairs in which the four winds pile all of their most precious booty. In my already melancholy state, I found it difficult to watch those four shamefully dedicated men, each standing opposite another, doing the work that Erwin had not helped me to understand.
Holding there, sharing my gaze between those four pathetic souls and the emptiness where the flour was not piled, I awoke to the realization that these four themselves had not feasted on that savory bread in such time, that their eyes failed them in discerning the breeches in the walls. After a moment of due reverence, I shook from my head enough of the pity that I was able to discriminate my own quaking voice as the warm winds carried aloud a dismal query to the only available pair of ears, "With life's sweetest morsels already years absent from your once-full table, and the true and honorable grain now captive to the insatiable winds, can you hope to scrounge from humanity's leavings fare sufficient to nourish your famished heart?" …
I think that's enough for one page. What else would anyone possibly want to know about me, anyhow?
Last Revised: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 2145 UTC