MidCenturyRadios.com

My Other Interests

My Job

I am Chief Engineer at Weathermate, a Lebanese air conditioning company. The company was created by my father in 1963, and was the first Middle East producer of air conditioning products. We manufacture heating and cooling coils, heatpump air conditioners, air handlers, water chillers, and other related items. I am responsible for the manufacturing, assembling and testing of our products. Some of my projects at the company include the development of an HVAC application that runs on the Windows platforms, and the design and construction of a pneumatic bending machine to produce "L" shaped finned coils for our small condensing units. While coil bending is not new in the AC business, our company was the first in Lebanon and the Middle East to produce "L" coils with a locally-built bending machine.

Computer Programming

Computer programming is a great way to simplify repetitive tasks. I enjoy translating my technical knowledge into useful programs. My past experience in FORTRAN and BASIC under DOS prompted me to learn Visual Basic (VB) when I switched to the Windows platform. The speed with which you can build a Windows application in VB is nothing short of amazing. My first project was to port my old DOS air conditioning programs to Windows. The result was the HVAC Designer, which I presently use at work. My other VB creations include a pair of Color Finders for translating RGB colors to HEX values, and Surface Generator, which draws 3D surfaces from land survey data. These programs were all developed with early versions of Visual Basic. I am presently using Visual Basic 2005, which relies on the new .NET framework. My latest creations in VB2005 include 3D Graphics, which generates and renders 3D objects, and Milo Ray Tracer, which creates very photorealistic images. In addition to VB, I taught myself HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets to create websites similar to the one you are presently surfing.

Impressionist Painters

An appreciation for art is something we are born with. I've been talented at pencil and charcoal drawing since I was a kid, and I still have the drawings I made before I got addicted to radios. In 1995, I felt a renewed interest in art, which I expressed by doing a pencil drawing of a Sisley painting. I also assembled a 350 piece puzzle of Van Gogh's Irises painting. Eventually, I acquired beautiful painting books depicting the lives and works of 19th century French Impressionist painters like Monet (left), Renoir and Cezanne. While reading about these famous painters, I discovered Howard Behrens, a modern American impressionist painter whose work deeply affected me. I'd like to do a few paintings of my own someday, but only if I succeed to steal a few hours from my addiction to radios!

Some of my favorites