I've used this name for quite a while, which is based on my actual name.

Based:

In the South West of England.

Quick history:

• First access to a computer (at school) at age 12 (Northstar Horizon - Z80). Fixed two issues in the operating system from raw Z80 dissassembly when 15 - nothing much to youngsters these days !
• Owned a ZX Spectrum, BBC B and later an Atari ST(M) - I was absolutely blown away when we heard the first 45 seconds of digitised audio (Money for nothing - Dire Straits)
• Wrote an early self replicating program (now known as a 'virus') on the BBC (6502) that copied itself to the end of any inserted diskettes, and stopped certain games (including Chuckie Egg) being played on the school computers - what a killjoy I was !
• Wrote an early tape copier for the ZX Spectrum, and investigated game protection mechanisms at that time (I always want to find out how things work as I'm in a better position when they subsequently don't!) - most enjoyable challenge Tomahawk where unless one noticed the high bit of the refresh register being set along the way, the game crashed if you flew higher than 100ft (more recent games seems to be doing this slow death type of mechanism now) . Most disappointing, Jet Set Willy (a follow-up game that they really shouldn't have released!) - about four instructions in you just inserted three NOP instructions - boring. Also overcame a joystick programming issue for Spectrum game programmers and provided a solution for the game called Tornado low level.
• Went to 'University', re-wrote the comms routines and many others for a retail system in my 'industrial placement', and went on to manage this system. Went work mad, managing to break the company payroll, and still have the hand-written payslip to show the number of hours!
• Five years later on, managed an integration/user acceptance test for a multi-million pound project - managed a team of 25+ contractors/consultants and internal staff (I was the youngest in the team).
• Carried out high level evaluations of major customer systems ... 650k to 30m ... when the sales staff etc really listen !
• Went onto manage the Y2K software test project, where I showed that you can take 15 non-IT, unqualified people (using aptitude test selection) and turn them into very good analysts/testers - unfortunately a couple thought they were then Gods gift to the whole IT industry, and learnt a hard lesson having left us for big bucks in the city, and no work after Y2K !).
• Kept being selected for project management roles, especially co-ordination between business and technical staff, but always techie at heart.
• Became the Application Architecture Strategy Manager.
• A company change and an advert gave me the push to change roles for a more rewarding technical management role.
• Now responsible for day to day availability of main infrastructure for a company, but keep on coding in my spare time. Also increasingly becoming a specialist in IT contracts, Security policies, ITIL and general IT management

Main interests:

• Understand why things do what they do - driven until I can work this out.
• Networks and datacomms and especially the security measures to maintain these
• Providing good customer service - yes, strange thing to say really, but I believe in this.
• Providing good IT Service Management - ITIL Manager qualified.
• Monitoring systems to detect upcoming issues
• Technical project management, Prince 2 practitioner certified
• Encryption technologies
• Programming (poorly) in various languages - BASIC (variety), Pascal/Delphi, C/C++, 8086, CoBOL, IBM 370 assembler and the amazing power of the IBM SORT routines running on a mainframe - mind-blowing. Much prefer to fix/improve existing code rather than start from scratch. Recent programming of Windows Mobile devices as this is a growth area for the next few years.

Dislikes:

• Coding user interfaces or database applications - boring as hell for me
• Writing long documents
• smalltalk programming - bloody animals and colours is all I remember of this.