What, are you still here? Well, if I haven't put you off by now, then a bit about me ought to finish you off nicely.

I enjoy driving (well, it's hard not to in my MX5), motorsport, tennis, canoeing, skiing, cycling, golf, films and books (though never films of books or books of films), and computer games.

I'm a Software Engineer. Or at least, that's what they pay me for. And I spend my days writing computer software. So I guess it's true. Well, to be strictly accurate, I spend the even days adding bugs to my code, and the odd ones removing the worst 10% of them. Since most of my days are pretty odd, it's amazing I make any progress at all.

I enjoy doing loads of other stuff, and my job often involves small bits of writing, DTP, web page design, artwork, and playing about with audio, as well as just programming. You can see some of my work in other areas of this website. I realise I'm no good at any of these things, but so long as I enjoy myself, that's the main thing. Keeps me off the streets. Which I'm sure you'll find reassuring the next time you find yourself alone in the city at night.

I originated in Northampton, England, in the Summer of '69, and emigrated to New Zealand when I was 2 (with, I must admit, a little bit of help from my parents). I spent 22 years there getting a tan and an MSc in Computer Science (graphics). Returning to England for a 3-week holiday in '93 I accidentally got a job in Hemel Hempstead, and the rest is history (including, unfortunately, the tan).

At present, I'm a Senior Software Engineer at The Digital Village in Covent Garden, London, England. This is a company set up by the comedy sci-fi author Douglas Adams, famed for the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Radio series (and books, TV series, computer adventure game, and upcoming film).

Our present project is a game adaptation of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy which we are developing for Swedish publisher Pan Interactive under the secret code name The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - although we usually call it h2g2 because we're lazy. Which is silly really, as h2g2 is the name of the Website produced by the other half of our company - the Earth Edition of the Hitch Hiker's guide. Although it has now been taken under the mighty and auspicious wing of BBC online. Give it a try - and perhaps become a roving reporter for - h2g2.com.

I led the dialogue team on Starship Titanic, The Digital Village's first game project. This was a complex and ambitious project, involving a Natural Language parsing system linking typed user inputs to a database of over 11,000 pre-recorded responses (14.5 hours of continuous prerecorded speech!).

I then became Producer/Lead Programmer for the internationalised versions of Starship Titanic. This included Raumschiff Titanic, the German translation which was produced in-house, and acting as Technical Liason for the externally-attempted French and Japanese translations.

Prior to joining TDV, I worked in a stately home at Xara, where I helped write CorelXARA, a 2D vector art package similar to CorelDraw! only much easier to use and (at the time) over 10 times faster. Our company subsequently sold out to Corel, doing a deal to let them 'publish' (squash) the program while copying (badly) its best features into CorelDraw! Xara still lives, but has not enjoyed the success that being infinitely better than all the competition should have assured. See my Gallery for some examples of Xara artwork.

Before CorelXara, I worked for Computer Concepts (later to be renamed Xara) on products for the Acorn RISC platform. The main project was AudioWorks, an editing program for processing 8, 12, and 16 bit mono or stereo digital audio samples, with futher work on low-level audio playback codecs and device drivers for the Eagle and Lark audio sampling cards.

Prior to that, I dabbled in writing Public Domain software and a few smaller commercial packages (most notably NovaPaint, a simple, fast painting program, for David Pilling Software) while pretending to be a University Student.