Ken Koellner's Home Page

Family

Check out some pix. They're kinda old. Some newer stuff on Shutterfly .

Here's where Polly, Michael and I live. That the seller's picture from when we bought our house in the mid-90s. It's been painted since this picture was taken. It's a dark green-blue now.

Skiing

In winter, I work weekends as an alpine ski instructor at Wachusett Mountain in Princeton MA. With my day job and fun ski trips with family and friends I have about zero free time in winter but who cares, it's skiing.

EpicSki is my favorite ski web site.

I'm a member of PSIA .

Music

I play a little mandolin, ha, very little. Well I started a couple years ago and with family, job, and skiing, I get to practice only so much. Still, I can bang out a few okay tunes.

Click here for my Pandora station.

Yet Another Mandolin Forum is a great free and open place to discuss mandolin. Discussion can be fast and loose but that can be a good thing. There's also room for people interested in mando to discuss a variety of topics which give it a community feel.

Mandolin Cafe is the most popular mando site. It's a commercial interest so discussions are moderated and may be censored if things get out of hand. Still it has critical mass so it's well worth reading and asking questions there. I often ask technical questions and get some good answer from kind and knowledgable folks.

Mandozine has a lot of mando info. Many many practice tunes in TabEdit files are available there. It's also the place to sign up for the CoMando mailing list if you want even more mandolin discussion. There's also a forum there now.

Lots of tunes at www.alltabs.com.

Lyrics and chords at www.rukind.com.

New bands I like include--

The Waybacks
Railroad Earth
String Cheese Incident
The Hot Club of Cowtown R.I.P. Elana had to change her name and go solo. Oh well.

Free Legal Music Downloads--

www.furthurnet.org
www.archive.org
www.etree.org
www.bluegrassbox.com R.I.P. Major loss here. What a great resource for learning new and old bluegrass songs.

Free Music Software--

www.winamp.com The best player around for all sorts of media. There's tons of neat plug-ins for it to. If you're a musician and are trying to learn stuff by ear, try the PaceMaker plug-in, it'll let you slowdown without changeing pitch or change pitch or both. Get the LameOut plug-in and save your output to mp3s. There's even an iPod plugin so you can kiss iTunes goodbye if you don't like Mac-style software.
audacity.sourceforge.net A good free recorder.
www.dbpoweramp.com Convert anything to anything (.wav, .shn, .flac, .mp3, etc.) right from Windoze Exploper. Be sure to get the codecs for shorten, flac, and find yourself the 'Lame' and/or 'Blade' mp3 codecs.
picasa.google.com Nothing to do with music but stuck it here anyway. A great picture organizer and editor. The best program to manage your pictures from your digital camera.
www.smartftp.com Use it to download/update from/to ftp sites. Free only for non-commercial use.

Eats

Go to the Plotzki Page for an old family recipe.

Kenz Patriot Blizzard Sauce is my own BBQ sauce recipe. It's the best BBQ sauce I've made from scratch and I like it better than any sauce I've had out of a jar. It's a South Carolina style sauce, vinegar and mustard based, not a tomato based Kansas City style sauce which is what a lot of people think of when they hear BBQ sauce.

My fave outdoor cooking device is the Weber Smokey Mountain, aka WSM. Read about it at the Virtual Weber Bullet site.

Work

For my real job (sorry but teaching kids to ski bumps doesn't pay the mortgage), I work in software. Earlier in my career I worked at computer companies but have worked at a publisher, Houghton Mifflin in Boston, MA since the mid 90s. I worked in data warehousing for a number of years using mostly Sybase. Then ecommerce and distributed applications and things like that mostly in C++ and Java with technologies like CORBA, Web Services and such. Now I work in something more to do with the company's line of business, a large web-based application The Houghon Mifflin Online Assessment System . It uses a whole bunch of technologies-- J2EE, JMS, Eclypse, Java, Hibernate, Oracle. Previously to Houghton Mifflin, I have worked at Siemens-Nixdorf Information Systems, Stratus Computer and Wang Laboratories. When I was in college, I worked part time at a software house in NYC called Software Systems Technology.

School

A long time ago, I went to school at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and before that Cranford High School.

Contact

You can send email to me at learn2turnNOSPAM@yahoo.com (edit out the cap letters).

Copyright 1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007 by Ken Koellner. All rights reserved.
Last updated 07/27/2007.
Ken Koellner Cranford 1974 Ken Koellner Cranford 1975 Ken Koellner Cranford 1976 Ken Koellner Cranford 1977 Ken Koellner Cranford 1978 Ken Koellner Cranford High School 1978 Ken Koellner WPI 1978 Ken Koellner WPI 1979 Ken Koellner WPI 1980 Ken Koellner WPI 1981 Ken Koellner WPI 1982 Ken Koellner Wang 1982 Ken Koellner Wang 1983 Ken Koellner Wang 1984 Ken Koellner Wang 1985 Ken Koellner Wang 1986 Ken Koellner Wang 1987 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1987 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1988 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1989 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1990 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1991 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1992 Ken Koellner Stratus Computer 1993