NB: This is desperately out of date; last altered around middle of 2001. Updates will come eventually. Maybe.
For my first 7 years I lived in Kingsclere in Hampshire. If you look at the map in the front of the book "Watership Down", you should see Kingsclere marked. Not that I was aware of this at the time, of course. During this time my two brothers arrived on the scene, Olly in 1975 and Laurie in 1977. I don't remember that much of note of my time in Kingsclere, other than cutting across the marsh to get to school. I really ought to get back there one of these days. Incidentally, the beast on the weathervane on the main church in Kingsclere is a bedbug. There's a story behind it involving a king, but I forget the details.
In 1980 my parents (and hence my brothers and I too) moved to Alderton, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. My parents are still living there, though the rest of us have flown the coop.
During this time, outside school my main interest was in Scouting. I was a member of Winchcombe Cub pack (Isbourne), then the 1st Winchcombe Scout Troop. I had some darn fine times when with the Scouts, and it was this that got me hooked on mountain walking.
I went to 6th Form at Pates Grammar School in Cheltenham for two years. I studied Maths and Further Maths, German and Physics -- a slightly unusual combination, but I liked languages so wanted to keep at least one up. I also did Italian as a side subject and took a GCSE in it at the same time as my A-levels.
While at Pates I was involved with the Bishops Cleeve Venture Scouts, and participated in insane stunts like the Sun Run (an overnight hike on the summer solstic between the Malverns and Cleeve Hill) and the Cotswold Marathon (a 42 mile overnight hike around Gloucester.) I swear, I've still got the blisters from the latter expedition.
I'd applied to Cambridge (St. Catz) to do maths, but was turned down, so instead took Warwick as my first choice university. But I wanted a year out before university, so after A-levels I started work at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern.
While I was at RSRE I applied to Oxford to do Maths and Computation at St. Hugh's. I went up for interview, somehow made them think that I knew what I was talking about, and got a place to start in October of 1991.
I finished at RSRE in June, leaving 3 months before university. Tewkesbury Youth Club were planning a September expedition to Tewkesbury's twin town in Romania, Intregalde. I got roped in as the interpreter for our trans-Europe drive. While I was at it, I learned basic Romanian from a book.
The expedition itself was something else. We spent 4 days driving across Europe in two minibuses, stopping in Germany, Austria and Hungary. Intregalde was a village in the Transylvanian mountains; few vampires were present, fortunately. We brought tools for the farmers, medicines for the vet and doctor, and paint to redecorate the local kindergarten. During the week in the village we got to know the locals, who were incredibly friendly and welcoming, and my Romanian improved to the point where it was merely poor rather than actually painful.
Finally it was time to go home, so we drove back to England. On the way we stopped at Melk-an-der-Donau in Austria which has to have the worst youth hostel in the world. The food was diabolical, and there was a train track outside our windows on which express drivers felt the need to sound their horns. But we got home alive, and I had about 24 hours of turn-around before heading off to Oxford.
The first year was reasonably hard going; our tutors (Mary Lunn and Ian Page) drove us quite hard, but not unreasonably. I managed to squeeze in a fair amount outside study, joining the university Scout and Guide Group and First Aid Society. So much happened that first year, it all fades into something of a blur. Highlights include "Winter Walking" with the Scout and Guide Group in Ennerdale over the New Year, Mods exams in the summer, and a month working at an orphanage in Romania. This latter was an experience I'm not sure I'd endure again, but I was glad that I'd done it.
I trundled through the second year, though subjects like Complex Analysis and Differential Geometry were pretty darn hard. My tutorial partner and I spent around 16 hours each on one Complex Analysis tut sheet. Ouch. Fortunately it got a bit easier after that. Also of note, during Michaelmas term I realised that I wasn't even fooling myself with my protestations of atheism, and became a Christian.
I hit the third year running. I'd ambitions to stay on for a D.Phil, which meant getting a First. Somehow, more by luck than judgement, I got it. Three months over the summer working at Shell Research in Chester, then it was time for the groves of academe.
Things started off OK, but by next summer it was apparent that my supervisor and I didn't see eye to eye. After a stressful Michaelmas I'd stopped enjoying the work, which meant that it was time to go. Application forms started to go out, and in February 1996 Praxis, a software engineering firm based in Bath, offered me a job. I started there the following July.
In my copious spare time I worked with the Bath division of St. John Ambulance, did some teaching for the Oxford University first aiders, ran to keep fit, and started a PhD with the Open University. This is due to last for the next 4-7 years, so requires a certain amount of bloody-mindedness to stick at it. Fortunately this is a commodity I have in abundance.
I spent an interesting few months over 1997/1998 working for a Shell Expro project. This involved working on their North Sea oil and gas rigs, so several engineers from Praxis including me did the 4-day helicopter and oil rig survival training at the RGIT Centre in Aberdeen. This included the experience of being immersed while strapped into a mock-up helicopter cabin, which was then inverted. Fortunately none of us drowned, otherwise we'd have failed the course.
I ended up going to around 8 oil and gas rigs in the northern and southern North Sea, which involved 7-day 12-hour shifts, some really good food, and learning a lot about the offshore culture. I'm not sure I could do it as a job, but it was well worth doing for a short time.
Not every Praxis job was been this varied, but there was usually a reasonable amount of interest and challenge. Praxis is stuffed full of very bright people, so there was no danger of being stuck in a stultifying environment. I earned the occasionally justified label of "Perl hacker", being prone to turn to that tool to solve 80% of all problems. Scarily, most of the time it turned out to be an ideal solution.
But in June of 1998, another opportunity presented itself..
After a couple of months, I decided that I rather liked America. Once I realised that it was a different language entirely from UK English, things got easier. I joined my township first aid squad, got hooked on Ally McBeal and Xena: Warrior Princess, attended Kitchell Memorial Church and enjoyed many a Saturday morning steak and eggs breakfast at the Whippany Diner.
While here I got over to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, Sandy Hook beach, Manhattan, the Catskill Mountains and Woodstock, and took a lazy weekend rail journey along the coast to Boston to see Roy, a pal from college. At the end of June 1999 when the posting came to an end I took a week of vacation to drive up to Toronto via Niagra Falls (best seen from the Canadian side, quite impressive) to stay with Aunt Beryl in Unionville for a few days, then across to the Adirondacks (Tupper Lake area) for some hiking.
Moving back to Bath was hard work. I can definitely
recommend against getting all one's worldly goods from
the Avis depot at Newark Airport to check-in in summer
heat. If you do, carry a change of clothes in your
carry-on bag.
Moving To Winchester
I came back to work at Praxis in July, which was a bit
disorienting but it was nice to be back and see the crew
again. Unfortunately the work wasn't really interesting,
with the exception of the odd bit here and there. I live
to write software, and pretty much all the work coming in
was testing and other validation. Reluctantly, for Praxis
is a good environment in which to work, I started looking
around for other work.
In early 2000 I applied to an advert from Teleca, a software company based in Manchester with a Winchester branch, for a software engineer position. They interviewed me, I liked them, they weren't physically repulsed by me, so I had a new job. Giving notice to Praxis I arranged it so that I had a two week holiday in between. This I used to go to California (San Francisco) and travel down the coast then across to the Mojave Desert for some serious hiking and mountaineering. Climbing San Jacinto (10800 ft) was the hardest thing I've ever done -- I took a cable car up the first 8500 feet, but the altitude and snow made the remaining height very hard work. Breathtaking view from the top though, recommended. More about this trip here.
Early in April I arrived in Winchester, got myself a car, found lodgings and started work at Teleca. The first week that I was there, they got bought out by the Sigma group from Sweden. Fortunately things have been a bit quieter since. After a couple of months I moved from being a code monkey to a team leader, heading up a small Teleca team on a software development project. I also moved to Andover, sharing a house with a Greek lass. In an effort to fill my evenings further I took up Tae Kwon Do again, joining the club in Andover.
In October I became a divisional manager for Teleca, meaning that I was now wearing three different hats at work. It was a bit of a crash course in management, but so far I've managed to avoid getting sued or fired. Long may that continue.
In September I presented a poster at FPL'00 in Villach, Austria,
and in October heard that I had another poster accepted for
FPGA'01 in Monterey, California in February.
Current State of Play
Work-wise I'm working on client site, doing development of telecomms software in the area of mobile phones. It's quite hackish, but good fun.
The PhD bimbles on. My work currently is looking at some fairly hairy compiling of SPARK Ada into an FPGA.
Outside work, I'm continuing to train at Tae Kwon Do, having just gained my green tag (7th Kup). A bunch of us from OUSGG have started a long-term project to walk the entire length of the Thames Path, from Kemble to London. The first leg was entertaining, as we spent what felt like half of the day wading through ice-cold water, due to the path being massively flooded throughout the South Cerney water park. Only about 172 miles left to go. However, foot and mouth has put it on hold for a while.