A little about me is a difficult task. I have never before attempted to paint a picture of myself in words. As I sit down to do it I have difficulty knowing what to say or where to begin, so please excuse a little rambling.

I am fifty four and have two daughters. My younger Daughter lives with her husband and son and my elder daughter lives with me. We sometimes argue, but we usually get on quite well - when we aren't competing for net time. Both my daughters are very clever. My elder daughter taught me HTML and is very good at it (just have a look at her home page. She pretends she is not smart, but it is only a facade. She can do anything she tries and is a very quick learner. She is studying Digital Imaging at Uni and is very good at it.

My first contact with computers was during my first stint at university in the late 1960s. I became aware of their operation before that time but did not actually see one until I went to university. In those days the computer interface was a punch card reader not a keyboard! Not very user-friendly! You could spend a week organising the material you wanted to put through the computer and punching the cards and then the computer would reject your material or give you a really strange result because there was one hole out of place on one of your 150 or more cards. You would then have the privilege of going over all 150 or more cards to find the error - the computer would only let you know there was an error NOT where it was. Computers really hated users back then.

The greatest advances in computer technology, as far as I am concerned, were the addition of the keyboard and the video display. With these came the advent of the easy correction and some great new programming languages. Thanks to inovators like John Baccus and Peter Naur for Fortran and Algol - BASIC is an offshoot developed from Fortran. You could now edit any error in your data or program in real time. Mind you, there was still room for some real bloopers, but it was easier. I came back into the picture with computers a few years later; about 1974. I had the opportunity to use a state of the art machine - the Canon Canola! It was really a fancy programmable function machine. You wrote your program on punch cards and fed numbers into it as input from a keypad. It was a great teaching tool, and not bad at simple statistics, but it was soon superseded by the Casio FX19 calculator - the marvel of the age. It was cheap, reliable and easy to use.

It was not until the late seventies that the marvel of the ages - the Apple 2 - became widely available. Steve Wozniac and Steve Jobs had done what others did not seem to want to do; or did not believe possible. They had given computers to the people. They started the computer revolution.(Yes I know about the Altair, but it was not user friendly)

Since that time I have owned a Commodore Vic20 (now defunct), a Ti99/4A, an XT laptop, a Mac512, a 386SX, a 686 p166+, an M2 333, a p2 233 and a couple of K6 II 500 machines one of which is my daughter's internet machine at the moment and a the other machine is my Linux machine, my window on the world - my internet machine. Of all these machines only the Ti 99/4A, m2 333, p2 233 and the k6 2 500s are still in regular use. The Laptop was replaced with the p2 233 server which is now a Win2000 server on my home network (I am studying a Win2000 server course at the moment). I have so many old bits of computers about my place that I guess I am the same with computers as some people are with their custom cars - always tinkering! However, I'm not really a computer nut but they are sort of a hobby and I do go to 4 or 5 computer meetings each month.

I have no formal qualifications in computing yet (although I am also studying with the CISCO Academy for my CCNA and CCAI), but I do have a B.A. in Mathematical Statistics, a Diploma in Special Education which qualifies me to teach both the deaf and the blind (I taught braille for about 18 years) and an M.A. in Special Education which qualifies me to teach in just about every other area of Education imaginable.

As you have probably guessed already, I teach for a living. Not in a regular classroom any more, but teaching nevertheless.

My favourite sports are Golf, Weight Training, Cycling and Fishing and my favourite pastimes are Billiards, Computing and contemplating or debating our place in the cosmos. I enjoy Astronomy and the associated speculation about how it all began. (exciting discoveries like the "earth-like" planet discovered around a star in the Milky Way in January in 1999 and all those discovered since really catch my attention)I guess I would like to know the answer to: "What's it all about?", as it was so elegantly put in the Monty Python movie "The Meaning of Life".

Well, I guess that's me. My likes and dislikes can be easily deduced by looking at my other pages some of which are actually situated at a different site but accessed from my front page. If you have not already had a look at my links page then you may find it an interesting place to start. It probably gives a more comprehensive overview of my tastes than I could easily describe in the short sketch you see here. Back

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