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|MY NAME IS |
...and I have a passion for design. I also like to dress up as a pirate sometimes. Perfectly normal. Anyway, I'm mostly a web and graphics designer. This website is my newest creation. I live in the East London area, made famous by a certain documentary called 'Eastenders'. Well, actually it's not really like that here. Mostly. I recently moved back here to finish off my masters degree in Digital Media. Considering I previously graduated from a degree in Entertainment Technology and a diploma in Computer Science I think I'd say I was offically a '633K'. For your own sanity, I hope you don't know what that means.
I've been using computers since I got my hands on my dad's Sinclair Spectrum ZX 128kb(!) and figured out that I could skip levels in games by not rewinding the cassette-tape when the computer told me to. That was the first time I ever raged against the machine. It also gave me a taste of learning how things worked so I could break them in more complicated ways later. Since then, I later moved onto games consoles, before saving up saturday-job money to buy my own machine in 1999. Just to give you an idea of how long it took me to save up enough; when I started piggy-banking my shiny pennies, I had my eye on the cream of personal computing, the Intel Pentium 166MHz MMX. What did I end up buying by the time I had enough money? A middle-of-the-range Pentuim III 500MHz. But with that half-a-gig under the hood, at the time I was ready to conquer anything.
Soon after that I had built a website and was inviting all my school friends to see it. I was "da bell of da ball" to quote 'Prison Mike'. Indeed, the heavily framed, animated .gif monstrocity attracted so much attention during our early IT classes on the gummy-bear coloured Apple Macs that our poor teacher had to go around the class specifically to stop pupils from visiting my website. Well, that was back when computers were unusual, the 'hamster dance' was cool, and there were only three Star Wars films. But since that time, I've learnt alot.
Fast-forward to university, and with all the parties, and going out, and 'learning', I was still the go-to-guy when it came to computers. I built my first computer in my first year, when my good old 500MHz box couldn't cut it anymore. On the new 1.1GHz monster (overclocked to 1.5GHZ) I was able to do insane things, such as write essays, code html and check my email. Yes, indeed, I was in heaven. I loved university; I spent most of my days coding websites or building computers. I was on-call-IT-support for my friends, and I took every opportunity to do what I loved doing. On the way, I got some qualifications or something, but what I mostly gained, I think, was a love of IT, the web and designing for people. Whether that means spending hours making a site cross-browser compatible, staring blankly as my carefully crafted code looks like a puzzle exploded in IE, or drawing an image so small that I start to hallucinate, it's what I do best. And it's what I love doing.