Who am I?
I am one of the 'original three' that setup adaptavist.com, the lead developer on the Theme Builder project and the initial creator of the Bubbles project.
Tinpot biography
I first started using computers when I was 7 (TRS-80 Model 1 - level II), by 9 I had taught myself to code, by 14 I had taken and gotten an A in Computer Science O-level - My birthday is in late august, so I was always a year younger than everyone else and I took the course a year early at the local techinical college since my school didnt offer the qualification.
After taking advice from people already in the computer industry I eschwed the computer science degree route, and took a degree in Applied Physics instead with my interests lying in Optics (Lasers in particular) and Low-Temperature Physics.
After leaving uni I worked for one of the worst companies on the planet who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty! Lets just say that the QA department refused to allow us to use 'functions', since they couldnt quite grasp the concept! They even had issues with the use of GOSUB (yep, you guessed it - Business Basic with LINE NUMBERS!) ... at least it taught me to write flexible parsers with nothing more than .indexOf!!
Following that there have been a fairly small succession of positions (I tend to stick with things rather than chop & change) where I learned many valuable lessons, mostly from the mistakes of my seniors about how not to deal with projects. Eventually culminating in the meeting of minds that created adaptavist.
The rest as they say is history.
Other interests
My interests are as wide and varied as my hairstyle suggests, these range from Bee keeping (hey, what can I say, I love honey) to Morris Minors.
In particular the Minor is one of my true passions, since it allows me to take a break away from high technology yet still apply the same problem-solving skills that fulfill me and keep my mind active.
I currently own two Minors :
- Masie, a 1967 two-door stock Morris Minor that I bought off the wife of someone I went to university with - she had lain idle for 7 years, yet with a squirt of oil down the cylinders, a new battery and a dash of petrol in the carb she fired up and purred away happily on the first turn of the key - gotta love the a-series engine. After several years, a complete strip-down to a bare shell and then full rebuild, Masie should finally hit the road this summer
- Audrey, originally a 1954 Morris Minor pickup heavily customised in the mid seventies to give her a 2-litre V4 motor, automatic gearbox, Jag live-axle on the rear and Vauxhall-Viva coil-overs on the front ... in truth she is in a terrible state, the front suspension isnt nearly strong enough to support the weight of the Essex-V4 and massively over-engineered chassis, the gearbox lacks an oil cooler and the radiator is the original morris unit designed for a 1 litre engine!