All About Me

This is not a typical story of a child growing up with computers, building software from the age of 3, and eventually being asked to attend M.I.T!

I was born in Germany in 1981. As my father was in the British army, we soon moved back to England, where my little brother was born. Every two years or so I moved homes from one country to another, until I was nine years old. At that point, my father decided to leave the army, and we moved to the South West of England. I attended junior school for about a year and a half, before moving up to my local secondary school.

At secondary school my main interests were computer games and role-playing games. Although I liked playing on the family PC, I didn't have any skills or interest to develop any skills. Near the end of my secondary school life, my interests turned to working with children with disabilities, both physical and psychological. I spent a lot of my time at a a local school for children with disabilities, and this influenced my decision to take an Advanced GNVQ in Health and Social Care at College.

Due to my girlfriend (at the time) being ill, I took three years to do this course, and was quite happy when it finished! At this point in my life I decided that I loved working with children with disabilities, but I didn't like 'learning' about working with children with disabilities. As I had already now taken three years of the same course, I wasn't ready for higher education, so I took a year out to earn some money.

For my year out I worked in a local sports shop as a supervisor. This was great to start with, quite a bit of money coming in, but after a while the sixty hour week took it toll, and I started getting really fed up of it. I wanted to start learning again, but I couldn't take a full time course because the University year was already half way through. I decided to take a evening course part time, but I didn't know which course to choose. At the time I had started using the home computer a lot more, and the computers in work were interesting to work on, so I decided to take a computing course. The problem was that I already knew enough about computers to skip the 'beginner' courses, but not enough to take one of the 'advanced' courses. Because of this, I decided to take a computing course I had absolutely no experience with, programming.

At the end of my year out (and after I had finished) I decided that working with computers was something that I really wanted to do, but I didn't want to go back to college to take another course. I contacted my local college about taking an advanced course in computing, and after a interview, the course leader decided I had enough knowledge to take the course without any pre-requisites. The course I decided to take was an HND in Computing and Multimedia. This was two years long, and covered most aspects of I.T and computing, including hardware, programming, networking, web-design, and interface design. I completed this course with a good understanding of computing, and a keep interest in Macromedia Flash, desktop hardware, and computing security. At this point I decided to contact a University about 'topping up' my HND into a degree.

After a long battle with paperwork and negotiation, the University accepted me, and I spent the next year and a half learning all about the Java programming language, networking, and commercial web sites amongst many other things. My dissertation was entitled "The Windows Start Menu: Was it designed with children in mind?" and investigated whether the Microsoft classic Start Menu was intuitive to use by all users, and if not, how could be improved. I completed my degree in June 2005, obtaining a Second Class First Division with Honors in Computing and Multimedia.

Currently I am applying for the UK Police Force and hope eventually to be part of the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) to *dons Superman costume* fight crime and make the internet a better place for all.

My skill set

I have many computing skills, which are varied over a broad spectrum of computing areas. These include but are not limited to:

• Building complex animations and menus in Macromedia Flash
• Building complex web sites in HTML and JSP
• Programming large applications in the Java programming language, including networking, problem solving and data storage
• Networking, including low level protocols, wireless, and wired, over multiple topologies
• Desktop operating systems, including Microsoft Windows 3.1, 9x, 2K, XP, Media Center Edition, XP x64 and Linux Mandrake, Redhat, Knoppix
• Server operating systems, including Microsoft Server 2000 and 2003
• Desktop and Server hardware, having built, serviced and maintained, many of my own and other company's throughout my life