I'll warn readers right now: This is going to be fairly dry compared to most of the site. It's a place I can make professional notes for use in later compiling a CV, or that I can quickly compose into those silly short resumes that those funny colonials tend to enjoy so much.

Up until recently, I was part of the scum of the earth, a university student. Worryingly enough, an intelligent university student. I was finally kicked out and awarded an Upper Second Class BSc (Hons) Computing with Applicable Mathematics degree from Staffordshire University's School of Computing. My personal fields of specialisation are encryption, coding theory and cognitive science. As part of my degree, I had to work on a year's work placement with a company similar to an American internship. Departing the fair shores of good old England, my placement took me to Munich, in Bavaria (that's a part of Germany for Americans and other people that failed Geography).

Whilst I was there, I was employed by a large firm as one third of the systems and networks administration department. For any of you who have ever read the Bastard Operator From Hell, that could well have been me. My work entailed the usual chores of network administration, including backups and workstation installation, as well as scheduling downtime, performing specific installations, performing maintenance of both workstations and servers, writing programs to automate tasks in Perl and Unix shell scripts (ksh as opposed to csh) and a host of other things. The network itself was a large LAN of Unix workstations running Solaris 6 and an equal number of PCs. I was also in charge of the company's Intranet, which included HTML, CGI scripting in Perl, and work with PHP/MySQL, as well as Apache server maintenance.

When not working, I write. If you have browsed other sections of this site and the LiveJournal already you can probably tell that I write a lot. I have been told that I am good at it, but I don't fully believe that. In addition to the work hosted on this site, I have had other work published on The Wraith Project and the Unknown Armies site. I've been involved in a couple of fan-fiction and fan-book projects, nut nothing has yet come of any of them.

One of the things that seems strange to those that know is that my writing seems to need very little editing. Apparently to get work up to this level normally takes more than a spellchecker. Fortunately, all of my externally hosted work has gained editorial approval. On a good day, in between work and with the ideas flowing freely, I can get about 3000 words typed an hour.

And yes, I do consider myself a bastard.