Introduction

I was born in Carmarthen, South West Wales, UK on November 23rd 1976. For all my childhood I lived in a small village near Pendine. Pendine itself is a small village on the South West Wales coast. Most people have not heard of it unless they have been on holiday there, or are interested in the Land Speed Record attempts (the 7 mile long Pendine beach was used in the 1920’s by Malcom Campbell and Parry Thomas, plus others to gain the record).

Until July 1988, I went to Llanmiloe County Primary school. After that, I passed my 11-Plus examination allowing me to go to Whitland Grammer School in September 1988. The following year, this school merged with one of the local Secondary Modern schools to become a comprehensive called Ysgol Gyfun Dyffryn Taf which was still based at the old Whitland Grammar site. I remained at this school to do my GCSE’s (used to be called O-Levels) and then my A-Levels. I left school in July 1995.

What did I achieve at school? Well, certainly nothing on the Rugby pitch or any other sporting arena! I was the skinny swotty one. Most of my achievements were academic. I graduated from the University of Wales, Swansea in July 1998 with an Upper Second in Computer Science. My first job was for a software development company called Science Systems, based in Chippenham, England, UK. Most of my work there was systems for Electricity company billing systems (exciting ehh? :) ). I started work there in August 1998. Most of my work involved using Visual Basic to produce client software, and using some C with SQL and PL/SQL for the server code. I also did some work using Java and CORBA.

Then joined a company based in Bath, doing Telecomms software.
I moved to Bath in May 2002. Lovely place to live, with some fantastic pubs. (If you are more of clubbing person, I recommend Bristol instead).

In July 2004, I transferred to the Japanese Office of my company, and lived in a place called Matsudo. It was about 45 minute train commute from the centre of Tokyo. My then-girlfriend returned home, so I followed her out there.

In December 2005, we got married.

Life was pretty interesting out there and my Japanese has slooooooowly improved.

Would would have loved to stay out there a few years, but concerns about regional geo-political situation (the Chinese and Japanese aren’t best of friends at the moment), and Peak Oil meant that we came back to the UK. Also, with my job role out there I had to travel a lot and I was away from home.
So, I returned to my old department back in Bath as of December 2006, which means I have a desk job. It was fun living in Japan, and visting Singapore, Mexico, Thailand, Australia and India, but it’s time to settle down (plus me and the wife are getting broody)

Ultimate plan… get out of computing. Own some land in the country. Become self-sufficient!
Suppose I’ll have to plod along in computing for a while, before I can do that (unless modern civilisation collapses, knowing my luck).

Hobbies

I have developed an awareness of eco-issues, having become aware of the Peak Oil issue (we are in for a bumpy ride in the next couple of years).

I have a few other interests. I’m rather into movies (Hollywood stuff and foreign language, like French, Italian and Japanese).
Photography is a bit of an interest as well. I got a Canon 300D SLR.
My other main interest has been learning Japanese.

I was pretty interested in Motorsport, but these days I haven’t had much time to watch it. Been ages since I went kart-racing :( Never mind!
Obviously, I still love to watch rugby a lot. Bloody annoyed I was not in Wales when we finally won the 6 Nations in 2005!
Football is the other sport, though this is pretty much confined to the World Cup and European Championships, and the odd international game when Japan are playing.

Find out more

I’ve got a number of sub-pages on various topics of interest to me. You can see these in the links below.

This page has the following sub pages.