Allan West's homepage

My main interests are my wife, Jane, and our dogs, Topol and Diego, who each have their own home pages. My wife and I enjoy travel for cultural exploration.

In the fall of 2006, Jane and I earned our amateur radio technician licenses. Now we've upgraded to amateur extra, but we're not terribly active on HF yet. We both participate in emergency communications through the ARES volunteer programs. Since 2010 I've been the ARRL VE Coordinator for the Gainesville, FL, area.

After I completed my Masters degree, I joined FEMORS, where I am a radio and computer geek, and part of the DMPU logistics team. This is what I spend most of my vacation time on, currently.

For my personal interests, see the links below. I'm a big Macintosh fan, through all of Apple's hard times and bad press, I always knew I was using the better personal computer. I've also administered Windows, AIX, Solaris and RHEL, and now I'm out of the business of managing hardware, so I'm getting to be vendor agnostic. I have a resume if you want to know all of the things I work with.

Jane and I had a lovely wedding the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1994, without suits or ties; I wore jeans and she wore a homemade dress. We had a chocolate wedding cake, and the bride and groom on top were crickets. Our second anniversary featured a chocolate truffle cake from the Hershey's Online Cookbook. There are wedding pictures and photos of our families. We also offer some tips on how to have a stress-free wedding.

We traveled abroad to Italy in 2000 and Greece in 2004. The links have photographs and travelogues from our trips.

In 2002 we bought a house, whose mortgage payments was small enough to allow us to travel before we paid it off. In 2021, we moved into town and now live in southeast Gainesville, closer to work and outside of HOAs.

From 2003 through 2013 I was a graduate student in the M.E. Rinker, Sr., School of Building Construction at UF. I completed my Masters in May, 2013, after taking one class per semester through UF's Employee Education Program.

I have inherited one of my great-grandfather's, and one of Jane's great-grandfather's Hamilton pocket watches, which I wear instead of a wrist watch.