Non-academic activities and hobbies

My hobbies cover a number of different activities.

Of cause as anyone else I can spend a good time at the pub or a club. Many of my friends suggest that I should rent a private room at a cinema and live there as I watch up to 50 films every year.

I also like to travel, visit new places, countries; meet people and learn new things from different cultures.  A good holiday for me will find me planning to spend it abroad.

In addition I am PADI certified Advanced Open Water Diver, this means that part of the holiday I will spend underwater.

My other hobbies include electronics and DIY robotics.  From early age I was interested in electronics and tried to understand its internal structure. As usual at the very beginning I was taking broken electronic devices apart and trying to repair them, but in the end I usually ended up with a number of spare parts rather than a working device, although there were some lucky results. At about the age of six I gave my grandparents their first colour TV, unfortunately for them I did it by painting the screen of a black and white TV with paint.

Those days are now long gone. Nowadays I have stopped “breaking” things and try to build/develop my own.

Today I will work on a small personal project which combines two of my passions: scuba diving and computing, building DIY underwater ROV which will be controlled by a PC and able to submerge down to 10-20 meters.  The project is in the blueprint stage at the moment and will appear on the “Projects” page as soon as designs are finalised.

I am also teaching myself electronics and personally building number of electronic components for the ROV.

But no matter how many and what kind of activities I am involved in, my number 1 priority is a successful career in IT.