previous latest addition here
i find other people's "about me" pages required reading. it's been interesting writing this.
knaresborough, uk: 17 years in a smallish town in north yorkshire. school at aspin primary and then king james's comp. i fell through the years unaware of anything much, outside my family (mum, dad, and a sister that fought me furiously) and a few friends. i think my parents were worried i didn't socialise enough, but i was happy doing homework or making things (model aeroplanes). didn't do much sport, although i always seemed to be ok at running (somehow ended up in a race one school sports day - the 400m, i think - which i won).
somehow i missed out on adolescence. i remember being vaguely self-conscious at times, and puzzled by girls, when i thought about them (rarely). but there was no violence or anger. i don't remember the stupid macho crap. or rather, i remember it in only in others (so many of them must still be there, working in shops, or on farms, or in small factories).
cambridge, uk: (i'm already confused - i seem to have lost a year between school and university, when i lived and worked in stevenage; a glum, fairly grim time, living in other people's houses, independent but alone).
studying was interesting and easy, until towards the final exams. for years i had a steady girlfriend (chun-wa chung, now working for unilever, i think).
cambridge is a strange place. as an undergradutate i belonged to a small group of friends, from similar (middle class) backgrounds. cosy and safe. i'm not sure what the alternative was - the exciting cambridge intellectual life that appears in books seemed noisy, pretentious and empty. still does. after graduating, the group dispersed and i continued with physics. not liking quantum mechanics i chose a phd astronomy.
astronomy was interesting largely because it involved computing. if i'd been more aware of this, and a little more conscious of my own life, maybe i could have avoided wasting a large chunk of time doing the bits of astronomy that weren't computing.
la serena, chile: a short post-doc position (almost a year) in la serena, working with jack baldwin. paulina was my neighbour in the compound. didn't do much astronomy, but enjoyed life. spent the end of the year in paulina's mother's house, in santiago.
to the east of la serena, in the andes foothills, is open desert. i bought a mountain bike, fitted it with extra water bottles, and explored the area.
we both managed to get open post-doc positions in the uk, so chose edinburgh (i didn't want to return to oxbridge, london seemed a bit too noisy).
edinburgh, uk: two years as an astronomy post-doc, during which time i wrote many of the older pages here and learnt java (previous work had been in fortran and perl).
pauli found life hard in edinburgh for the first couple of years, but she stuck it out, found a way to live in a new country. for me, astronomy was increasingly pointless and my first "real" job something of a shock: that i could be both a useful programmer yet clearly have so much to learn said something worrying about my co-workers at concept systems. their homophobic and anti-english sentiments didn't impress me either. intertrader was a very welcome relief.
during this time i wasn't just learning computing at work, but spending most of my free time on it too - i bought a laptop, installed linux, and started exploring other computing languages, theory of algorithms, etc etc. my enthusiastic - if largely uninformed - search for knowledge helped drag lambda (programming languages weblog) through it's first year.
mountain biking wasn't as much fun round edinburgh (less open space, poor weather), and then the bike was stolen. instead, i started running.
leicester, uk: domestic bliss. pauli got a post-doc position in leicester, so we moved south. we bought a small terrace house and spent every sunday for a year and a half renovating and decorating. when we first moved in i had a strange paranoid week (after arguing with some kids in the street), but came to love the place. i was as happy as i'd been in la serena.
i stayed working for intertrader, tele-commuting from the back bedroom. at the time i wrote (for this page):
so, imagine me sitting in my "office" - the back bedroom, upstairs in our house, where i work. plain white walls and a lot of wood (much from ikea): shelves like you'd find in a warehouse on two walls, holding books, papers, tools, lps; polished floorboards (mostly old, toffee brown, a few almost-green where i had to replace woodworm damage - they'll be brown too, in another hundred years) with an old rug from chile folded in one corner; blinds at the window; green swivel chair; magazine rack on the wall with recent copies of lrb; big desk covered in paper, cds, telephones, anglepoise lamp always on, my work computer's keyboard and monitor pushed to the back, laptop open with me (fairly thin, white, big nose, unshaved, glasses, thinning shaved hair) sitting typing this (black jeans, grey hooded top, hood over a pair of headphones plugged into a portable cd player playing goldie's timeless).
curiously, as i revise this page (sitting here, waiting for the war in iraq to begin), now living in chile, i'm sitting at the same desk, wearing the same grey, hooded top, headphones and cd player at my side.
santiago, chile: paulina got a permanent position at the university of chile, so we moved back to chile. started to keep a diary of sorts. i found a job programming for webtron, writing software for zurich financial services. i took on more and more responsibility, carrying the project, forcing it into something resembling a decent project against a fierce deadline.
with little support and lots of pressure from my superiors i felt exploited and abused. i resigned, shattered. there must have been some huge cultural misunderstanding - whatever happened, it left me exhausted, depressed, and deeply angry. after a month of doing little except sleep and sunbathe (and occasionaly shout and/or cry), i returned to work under different conditions, with no fixed contract, negotiating each sub-project (typically a couple of weeks) at a time.
we've bought another mountain bike and i'm cycling again - currently more on roads, as i had a couple of nasty accidents off-road. i'm also still running a couple of times a week, trying to get back to the fitness i had (long runs of an hour and a half or so at the weekend) before the long hours at work stopped me from doing any exercise.
i'm still learning how to program. things continue to make more sense - i now understand paul graham's claim that at heart everything is a small lisp interpreter. at least, there is something in the middle of the system i'm developing that can be taken as such. current projects include a "grep for xml" and learning tcl (again).
i'm also learning how to live in a different culture. it's been interesting, i guess. there's a strange freedom - you can choose who you will be in so many odd ways. but there are also new, massive, invisible, opressive social forces.
la serena, chile: an experiment - working shifts in la serena, 8 days, then returning to santiago for 6 days. still too early to tell how this will work out. the extra personal time is welcome, although the work itself has been slightly disappointing. still, the pay's (relatively - still not uk wages) good.