About me

I live in Birmingham and am a computer nerd: I love helping other people use their computers more effectively and have fun coding on them myself.

Ex-Cambridge resident

I lived in Cambridge (UK) for nearly 40 years.

• I was very involved with “CamNet: The Cambridge Freenet” for several years. However, the arrival of free ISPs in the UK saw an end to CamNet.
• I was a member of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign which is still trying to improve facilities for local cyclists. I edited their newsletter for a time in the mid-90’s.
• And I cycled a lot of the time. Mostly over the years my employer’s place of work was cycle-commutable. And, of course, for just getting around the city. Amazingly, I am only on my third adult bike.

Brum

I moved to Birmingham (UK) around 1 ½ years ago. I am currently pretending to be retired.

Cycling in Birmingham seems a daunting – and dangerous – prospect, so I’m yet to attempt it (the bike remains in a friend’s garage in Cambridge).

Computer nerd

I own a couple of Macs. And I work with people and their computers (almost all of which are Macs too).

I used to work for an international marketing/business training company as their IT Director. That meant I engineered websites (the coding and user-interface aspects) and did technical support for everyone. They had offices in several places across the UK.

In the job prior to that (27 years prior!) I worked for the electronic publisher doing technical support and looking after their web site. While there I also designed several websites for subscription-based services (in the early days of the web).

Before then I worked for a friend’s startup. We were writing computer-based training (CBT) software and I headed up a small development team.

Even earlier was a great 3 ½ years working for a computer-aided design (CAD) company. Initially I worked in their documentation department writing several of the more technical manuals, then I transferred to work as the programmer on their HVAC (ducting) application.

And my first job – after graduating from an engineering degree at Lancaster in 1986 – was as the User Liaison Officer in the Computer Centre of the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (CCAT), now Anglia Ruskin University.

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