About Me

About Me - Theodore Zacharia

I've been programming since the early 80's and from 1988 for a large, US based, global IT company. I'm based in the UK and am a senior analyst/designer/programmer, my official title is too ridiculous to mention but a/d/p best describes what I do.

Work and Programming

I've been lucky enough to work in many countries, for extended periods in some cases including the US, Canada and on the European continent (living in Belgium for over 5 years). I've not worked to Asia yet and have acquired the taste for travelling abroad as often as possible, especially if the company is paying! You can see a selection of my travel photographs here

I've worked on many platforms including Mainframes, UNIX, Solaris, Linux, Windows and others and in many environments, languages and tools including C, C++, C/C++ with SDK and MFC (on windows platforms), VisualBasic, PowerBuilder, Oracle Forms and Developer/2000, Forte, Java, JavaScript, HTML, PHP and Perl as well as various shell scripting languages including bourne and korn shell. I've worked mostly on enterprise scale, multi-national, large user community, client/server systems. I've worked with all the major databases including DB2, Oracle, Sybase and Informix as well as SQLServer and Access for smaller jobs.

I've completed many personal projects too, recently writing an IPTC tagger in Perl to enable me to easily tag the thousands of pictures I have taken (and scanned). Of course I code all the JavaScript on my website myself, including the cool expanding menu and the dynamic page generation in the Trips (and Photos) sites.

I'm ex-RAF (Royal Air Force) but my flying is now relegated to flight sims.

Hobbies

I am also into fast cars, photography, painting (mostly in oils and watercolours), watching SciFi movies on the big screen (and taking part in my head), and horse riding and Wing Chun Kung Fu.

Fine Art

I've continued my interest in art, and as a picture is worth a thousand words I will not bore you with any, so just go and look at my art here.

Photography

I've been into serious photography since 1982 when I bought a Minolta X-700 and 3 lenses as well as a tiny Hanimex 35ee with the funds for my first term at University (see here for a selection of my photographic equipment). A great investment as the X-700 still works and takes great photographs. I am a profuse photographer and take pictures of anything and everything, since switching to mostly digital in 2003 I have saved a considerable amount of money in developing costs - thank you digital. You can see a selection of my photographs here. Initialy my photography was simply for recording my travels and taking reference photographs I could later use for drawing and painting projects, but as my time for fine art decreased my photography became more of an art in itself rather than just a tool.

Being a programmer I of course have written a utility to add IPTC tags to all my images. This works at a command line level which mean I can basically do one, tens or hundreds of files in just one command. This was very useful when updating directories which had related content, but it also has add, update and replace modes to add extra information on each specific picture. For more see here.

Riding

I took up riding (English not Western) in September 1998 because a friend wanted me to go riding when I visited her in Switzerland, and I thought it might be a good idea to at least be able to get on a horse without getting killed, but I really caught the bug and ended up riding more than my friend. I took a school based BHS (British Horse Society) Preliminary and Novice stage Dressage tests (my teachers idea, not mine) and found to my surprise that I really enjoyed it (once it was over). I've also started jumping fences (this is my idea) - cool! In 2004 I finally rode western (in Argentina) and found it to be much more relaxed and easier than I imagined, the horses there were very well trained and forgiving.

Wing Chun Kung Fu

In September 1999 I finally took up Kung Fu, Wing Chun to be precise. I've always enjoy watching Bruce Lee movies but never really thought I could learn such an art. My sister Helen and I are now keen students of Wing Chun which is a great fighting system, our teachers are very good, and it is having the side effect of getting me fitter again. Check out their website at UKWCFKA if you'd like to know more. I train mainly at my local kwoon which is at the London HQ in Southgate. Being a photographer I took this photo of our 2006 Advanced class

Life in General

On the 25th of July 2004 I married Angela, we moved into our new house after the honeymoon in Thailand. You can find details of all of these events on my site, follow the Trips or Events links from the home page.

Something serious now, my Curriculum Vitae

Here is some information about my home computer systems.

TheoWare International (author of tzsh) is building a new HQ, bigger than global, it's intergalactic. It's still in the early stages of construction. Here's a view of the project as it stands now.

Theoware HQ

That's enough about me, here are some interesting and possibly even useful links:

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