User:Summerdrought

My name is Graham Winterflood, a resident of Cairns, Far North Queensland. Tourism promoters prefer to market the area as Tropical North Queensland, but it has been referred to as FNQ by locals for a long time. To distinguish ourselves from northern hemisphere residents, we sometimes refer to our location as the Deep North.

Interests include, but are not limited to: Outback travel, Australian deserts, navigation, astronomy, bird life, Australian explorers, military history, space exploration and more recently photography of birds, arachnids and dragonflies. I should include aviation, as it was my career for 41 years until retirement. The first computer I programmed using BASIC, had 100 bytes of RAM. The next was a huge upgrade to 700 bytes. Following that came the Commodore 64 with 64,000 bytes which would have been enough to facilitate mankind's landing on the moon in 1969.....


 * The first portrait I ever drew was one of JFK when he was still alive. I was a schoolboy then, and although you could tell who it was in the drawing, I was not all that happy with the result, as it wasn't quite right.  Having read Len Beadell's first book in 1975, and flown over many of the outback locations he explored and wrote about, I thought it was about time someone placed a picture of him in his Wikipedia article.  I did not have ready access to a photograph, so I thought I would draw one of him.  This is it, my second ever portrait.


 * My interest in navigation has led to the drawing of maps using Inkscape, a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) open source programme. I have been contributing maps and drawings to articles on Wikipedia that can be viewed here.