This page contains information about me. If you don't find this sort of thing very interesting then you might want to leave and return to the main index. My CV is now on-line and can be viewed here.
I come from Baughurst (near Tadley), a small town just south of the Hampshire-Berkshire border. I went to Burnham Copse Infant School, Burnham Copse Junior School and the Hurst Community School. From there I went to Queen Mary's College, in Basingstoke then to the University of Warwick were I studied Computer Science for three years.
Before I went to university I was offered a summer job at Grapevine Information Services (sadly now defunct) which I took. I worked there every holiday from summer 1995 to summer 1998. The job mainly involved writing software and technical support
In September 1998 I started working full time at John Clarke Computing, also known as Saturn Network Services, at Calleva Park Industrial Estate, as a Junior Analyst Programmer, then a Programmer/Analyst. I continued working there after the company was taken over by Ramesys, in September 2000, until I was made redundant in October 2001 (following the partial collapse of the travel industry after 11th September 2001).
In August 2002 I started working as a Web Programmer for Taylor & Francis, a large publishing company with bases located around the world (including London, Basingstoke and New York). In 2004 we merged with Informa, became T&F Informa for a while but are now back to being informa again.
While all this was going on I somehow managed to fit in buying a house and getting married.
My main interest is my wife.
My second interest is computing. I am particularly keen on programming and the history of computing. I have used a wide range of systems and the list of computers I have cluttering up my house at the moment includes an Acorn Electron, an Acorn Archimedes A440/1 and assorted PCs ranging from 8086 Amstrads through to a Pentium III 650. Click here if you are really interested in seeing which systems I own. I have also used various Sun machines, from the Sparcstation IPC to the Ultra 5, although I don't own any Sun boxes.
As far as operating systems go I have used Acorn's OS 1.0, OS 1.2 and MOS (on the BBC, Electron and Master 128) and RISC OS (on the Archimedes and RiscPC), and most of the versions of Windows up to and including Windows 2003 (yes, even Windows 1.0, briefly). I also ran Slackware Linux for a while, until I "upgraded" to Windows 95 and had to repartition my disc to give it enough space... (The machine was eventually rebuilt and it now runs the Smoothwall firewall.)
This page was originally created in October or November 1995 (I can't remember exactly when it was). It was originally intended to contain lists of links that I used frequently, more as a service to me than the rest of the internet. The pages may not even have been created if some of my friends hadn't started their own pages at about the same time. The original page contained mainly Star Trek, SF, Monty Python and Computing links.
The miscellaneous links section was added a few months later. A humour links section followed this, along with some links to people that I knew who also had pages. My pages then remained fairly static after that, except for the addition of the humourous text files section. After that, apart from fixing broken links, nothing much was changed right up until summer 1998.
When I left university I felt that I couldn't do without e-mail, and with the Demon e-mail account came 15Mb of web space, so I thought that I might as well make use of it... The redesigned pages started appearing on 27th August 1998.
I did some work on the pages in early 1999 and again in 2000. After yet another long hiatus, I finally returned to these pages in April 2002.
Despite making reasonable progress, I ran out of time before I could actually get a redesign going. In late 2002 it was pointed out that the pages looked "very 1995" (not surprising, really) and I decided to have another go at a redesign. It is now October (2003 when I first wrote this, 2005 now) and I am hoping to have a redesigned site up by Christmas, time permitting...
In terms of technology, these pages are written using XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and should validate. (They used to...) I also use Server-Side Includes and style-sheets (SSI and CSS). The upcoming redesign may well include some JavaScript and quite possibly PHP, if I can do something useful with it.
Well, that's the lot. Hope that it hasn't been too dull and boring... Click here to return home.