Hello.  This is a little picture of me.  You can click on it to get a bigger, 26KB, picture.  I thought I’d start with that because it seems that almost the first thing everyone wants to know, when I meet them on the 'net, is what I look like.  Of course, what the picture can’t tell you is that I’m Australian, 180cm, 85kg, and I was born in 1961.

Occassionally I write little snippets of code that other people have found useful.  I keep them in my software page.

I bought a digital camera early in 2003, and so of course I've now got a growing number of picture galleries for your viewing pleasure...  I've also written a small number of professional papers and other work-related documents which you might also like to view.

I like computers.  I always have.  I don’t mean that I like them as a friend, I mean that I enjoy working and playing with them.  Which is how I spend a lot of my time, you see I work with computers for money.  (How fortunate that I get paid for doing what I want to do, hey?)

If you think you might want to offer me work, you really should take a look at my resume first.

I had my first exposure to computers at school; Heathfield High School, in the beautiful hills of Adelaide.  That was in 1976, and using an excellent facility known as Angle Park Computing Centre.

I’ve done a lot in this industry.  My first professional job was in 1978.  I was still at school, and had a weekend job writing a program to analyse census data for CASSR at The Flinder University of South Australia.  Since then I’ve done so much that I no longer put it all in my resume.  After all, who’s interested in the stock control program I wrote in 1979? Or in the payroll I wrote in 1980.  Or that I was Canon’s Victorian State Programmer in 1982.  So much to discard, so much still to say!

I started my own company, DNA Pty Ltd, in 1985, and made almost no money for years after.  In the closing years of the last millennium DNA did very well, and in 1995 joined forces with another business, starting a new company, Tellurian Pty Ltd.

I’m the chief administrator of rebel, a fun, low cost Internet service.

I’m not all computers, of course.  I like music, in fact I’ve got quite ecclectic tastes in music.  When I’m working I like to listen to music ranging from Vivaldi to techno.  I’ve got all the usual Pink Floyd records.  Since the split, I’ve also got all of Roger Water’s albums, too.

I love cinema, particularly funny movies.  I don’t like scarey movies, life is scarey enough without art immitating it.  I think perhaps the most cynically accurate comment I’ve heard in a movie comes from John Cleese in Clockwise:

“It’s not the failure which gets to you, it’s the hope.”

I live in a horrid little house in the Adelaide metropolitan area.  I’ve got a pool out the back, which is a terrible expense and a waste of good garden area.  I had chooks, although most of them liked to travel, preferring almost anyone else’s chook yard to their own.  In the way of hens, their numbers undulated until I finally gave the last one to a friend who lived in the hills.  She—I mean the hen, not the friend—had barely moved to her new home, which came complete with one, lonely rooster, when she clutched a brood of beautiful little chickens.  I used to have two cats but they died and I haven’t got over that yet.  I also used to have fish, which were technically on loan (and overstaying their welcome!)  They have since been “repatriated”.  I don’t grok dogs or children!