I was nine years old when my mother surprised me with a Commodore C64. It’s a vivid memory, because we weren’t rich and she wasn’t much of a gift giver. I rushed upstairs, hooked it up to my small color television and learned everything that machine could do. Computers were pretty dumb back then, and did little unless you fed them some code. I spent many months trying to make it do interesting stuff instead of playing outside. It led to a life-long love of technology.

Technology progressed, as it is wont to do, and at some point I learned HTML and put some pages up on the nascent internet. It blew my little mind that I could publish something from my bedroom for the world to see. I started publishing in ‘blog’ format in 2005 to keep in touch with family when I moved cities, and I’ve kept going ever since. There is no theme to this site, and I’m not selling anything. It’s a repository of my thoughts and a way for me to explore new ideas. It’s my digital playground, my sounding board and my hobby. Some would say that blogs are old hat now, and they may be right, but they make the internet a more interesting place for me.

My career has spanned social work, criminal justice, housing and healthcare; often working in areas of entrenched deprivation and with people and groups that live on the very edges of society. Nowadays, my day job is managing commercial properties for a national health and social care provider, which fits with my interest in systems, buildings and infrastructure. I live in Yorkshire, the largest and greatest county in England, with my wife, two children, a small hamster and an unquantifiable number of fish.