about me

 

About Me 1I have always been very technically minded, much to my parents’ dismay I used to disassemble electrical devices and put them back together. I was one of those kids that had to program the VCR for his parents, as they never quite grasped technology.

I have been the computer geek pretty much since the first home computers appeared in the high street shops. My first computer was the ZX81 which I purchased from Boots with my paper round money when I was 11 or 12. This is where I learned BASIC programming, wrote some very simple games, and got bored very quickly of this 1K computer.

I then dabbled with the Dragon 32 and Amstrad, doing a bit more basic coding on my friends’ computers who desperately wanted me to re-create “war games” LOL. I then moved up to the best-selling home computer of all time, the Commodore 64 and learned 6502 machine code/assembler language.

During the 80’s, I was very active on compunet, wrote a few demos and joined a few cracking groups, coded some crack intros and had some fun with BBS systems and blue boxing/phone phreaking.

In the 90’s I started my first business importing, publishing and selling Commodore 64 hardware and software from the USA and Europe. Sadly I was a bit late to this party as 8bit computers were already on their last legs.

 

About Me 2

 

I went to college and did a City & Guilds in information technology and a BTEC national diploma in computer studies, during which I learned Pascal and Cobol, and was the the star pupil.

My first web related job was at Nacamar (a German ISP), where I learned about web servers and picked up some classic ASP and MS Access db skills, which was a stepping stone to my 2nd job at Redeye where I was introduced to ColdFusion,  and became an instant fan and long time contributor to the ColdFusion community since 1999 (since CF4). I then moved on to start my own web development company called Satachi and later founded “CFMX Hosting” which back in the day was one of the top CF hosts in the UK.   

Back in 1999 I setup CFMLDeveloper,  a service for ColdFusion Developers (and later Railo & Lucee) offering FREE developer hosting. I setup cfmldeveloper to help people try out and learn CFML with minimal effort and to help startups and contractors get going. I also built cflive.net, a live web-based CFML testing tool.

Sadly nothing lasts forever, and these services finally outlived their usefulness due to the dwindling size of the ColdFusion community, and after 20 years were finally laid to rest in 2020.

Outside of work, I am an ex-biker, but sadly the bike had to go due to other priorities (kids), a pretty good cook, a bit of a cocktail Meister, and a dad of 4.  I like rock music, have several tattoos, and am well known for my often brightly coloured mohawk, although sadly age is catching up with me now and there isn’t much of it left 🙂

 I am also a humanist, and live by The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles and Values, in other words, being a decent human being.

  • We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.
  • We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
  • We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.
  • We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.
  • We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.
  • We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.
  • We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
  • We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.
  • We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.
  • We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.
  • We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.
  • We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.
  • We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.
  • We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.
  • We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.
  • We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.
  • We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.
  • We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.
  • We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.
  • We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
  • We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.
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