Click on the image for a picture which wastes more bandwidth. I'll come clean now, though... I've had my hair cut short since this picture was taken at a Bike Magazine photo shoot. Why ? Mostly because I can, but also because long hair isn't a great blessing when riding motorbikes nor when diving.
Until recently I was Senior Systems Admin. at Netcom, looking after all the servers and internal UNIX systems use dto provide the dial-up and leased-line services.
As well as having to do the fun stuff like deciding what to try to persuade the finance people to let me spend your subscription fees on next, I did quite a bit of work on USENET, DNS and Sendmail as well as capacity planning, writing new code, and pretty much doing anything else that needs doing or takes my fancy.
In my "copious free time" I also run my own consultancy company, doing pretty much anything relating to the Internet.
Now, I'm contracting, doing much the same kind of stuff, but for more money and with less stress :)
Needless to say, I've spent a fortune on skiis and boots, too. I should buy shares in Salomon.
Well, you know, you surf around cyberspace for a while and before you know it, people want to know how many heads you have and if you really do own a pink and white leather one-piece suit (yes, and I wear it in public, too).
Where does the quote in your .signature come from ?
It's from Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. Some time I'll get around to looking up the exact reference and put it here. I do try to do as it says, but I've not yet got around to persuading myself that any sane person would jump out of an aeroplane with only a parachute to hold them up.
Are you the James Fidell that was at Warwick University, Computer Science, '85 to '88 ?
Yes. I've looked on the photographs and it seems that we look so alike that it must have been me.
And at Wellington School, Somerset for quite some time before that ?
Got me again, I'm afraid. (Yes, someone did e-mail me asking this one. Looks like I didn't cover the trail as well as I thought :-)
Anything else, send me e-mail.
"Yield to temptation -- it may not pass your way again"