You can zoom in if you like…

Born 1969, in Liverpool.

As a kid I was lucky enough to live in many places — a some­times dif­fi­cult exper­i­ence, but mostly pos­it­ive — liv­ing in Spain, the Isle of Man, Bel­gium and even the Canary Islands for a short spell. My first lan­guage was Span­ish and occas­sion­ally show this with ever so slightly lat­in­ised gram­mar in Eng­lish, but sadly a lack of prac­tice means I’ve lost any flu­ency in the lan­guage. I’m bet­ter at French.

In my teens I stopped mov­ing around and got some sta­bil­ity liv­ing with my grand­mother.  It was one of those clas­sic­ally poor as church mice exper­i­ences, but only by the stand­ard of West­ern coun­tries — we had a car and at one point even enjoyed cent­ral heating.

These days I love motor­s­port, trav­el­ling, gad­gets, dan­cing (badly and gen­er­ally only when I’ve sniffed a little too much wine), tech­no­logy and just get­ting on with life. I’m also vain enough to main­tain a blog.

After that little affair I settled down into a more hum­drum life, but always dream­ing up schemes and meth­ods to add a wee bit of spice. Work as a com­puter developer in a large chem­ical com­pany needed it.  It was safe work, but hard to get excited about.

Travel + Work = Not so bad

The best part of my life and career so far has prob­ably been the travel — although busi­ness travel in itself is dull dull dull it’s not so dif­fi­cult to add pleas­ure to it. By mak­ing the effort to add a day or two here and there, or eschew the idea of com­mut­ing by plane and actu­ally mov­ing into the city where you’re work­ing, you can really start to appre­ci­ate a country.

Even bet­ter were the people I met. Oh, and some bad times too — attemp­ted mug­gings, weird para­sites and wak­ing up hor­rendously hung-over, stink­ing of vomit, and sport­ing a new tat­too in a room I don’t recog­nise. And now it’s another new era. A friend of mine, James White­head and I decided to form a new com­pany which ended up evolving into a web devel­op­ment com­pany over at interconnectit.com which is finally doing quite nicely.

We’ve also launched a Word­Press Themes Club called Spectacu.la which is in very early days and, we’ll admit, has suffered some­what for being late to the party.  We should have star­ted releas­ing themes back in 2006, when we already had some pretty cool ideas float­ing around — it’s just that nobody asked us, and we were just a little too mod­est about our skills to go and shout about it.  Our mistake.

Still, these are inter­est­ing times — we’ve done a couple of high pro­file sites now: Polit­ics & The City, and Telecoms.com… and are increas­ingly involved with other media groups that we can only talk about later…