Most retired people today live very active lives long after they have stopped working for a pay check. At Green Life Innovators we believe that our community would be a great place for the technically minded people of the mature generation to hang out. And we believe that they have a lot to contribute to our community, sharing a life time of experience. Not at least because this is a generation that has more practical, hands on experience with a wide variety of things, than what is common in later generations. And we firmly believe that we need practically minded people to achieve our goals. In this interview you can meet one of them.

GLI: Tell us a little about yourself.

DW: I was born in 1941, near Liverpool England. After studying chemistry at Oxford University, I moved around in England for some years, until I finally settled here in Canada.

GLI: So, you are a Canadian citizen now?

DW: Actually I have dual citizenship. I have both a British and a Canadian passport.

GLI: What kind of work did you do after arriving in Canada?

DW: Even if I have my education in chemistry, I was not so keen on working as a chemists, so I looked around for other opportunities. Some friends of mine were teachers, and they seemed to have pleasant lives, so I decided to become a teacher myself and attended the University in Toronto for a year getting a teacher’s degree. Then I got a job in a high school in Toronto, but since they did not have any vacant position in chemistry, I ended up working as a teacher of mathematics, until I left teaching altogether in the early eighties.

GLI: Why did you leave teaching?

DW: I was not satisfied with the way the school system started to turn out. Too many politicians were seeking to gain too much control over what took place in a classroom. Up to then I had had the good fortune working in a school that gave you a great deal of freedom as to what took place in the classrooms. I ended up teaching my mathematics students far more than the curriculum. I taught them how computers worked and we built electronic circuits, for instance a calculator. I thought that since they were going to use calculators to do their calculations for the rest of their lives anyway, they might just as well learn how the thing worked. After I left teaching I worked as the editor of a computer magazine. It was then, that I moved into a new house, actually an old house, but new to me. And it was there that I saw that I could build my heliostat, which I talk about in two of the forums of GLI.

GLI: But now you are retired?

DW: Well I don’t see myself as retired, apart from the fact that I don’t work for a pay check any more. A lot of people in my age group see it that way. Apart from the people that happen to be very sick, most of us are still very active, living life similar to what we have always done, taking part in community activities, politics and so on.

GLI: So, you think that our community would be a good place to take part?

DW: Yes, I like the idea behind the community. I think it has a great potential and I hope we will attract many people so that we can realize this potential.

GLI: We have heard that you still play a bit with mathematics too.

DW: Yes, the other day I figured out a new way of factoring trinomials without trial-and-error, that I taught to my step son. He was very pleased about it. It will give him an edge over the other kids. He likes that!

Links: Forum posts from David Williams about the heliostat

Strange experience with a heliostat

Heliostat and sun tracker program

3D trig programming

If you have any questions for David about these project you can contact him at: williamsdavid65@gmail.com

Further reading:

• Website review: World Community Grid
• Website review: Open courseware, bringing higher learning to everyone
• Travel report, Philippines September 2009
• GLI Philippines Tour 2009, Sept 13th-October 2nd
• Website review : byexample.com