Originally from the United Kingdom, I am currently working as an IT Consultant in Västerås, Sweden. I currently specialise in the areas of Java web applications using Struts on Weblogic, Tomcat and other web application servers and have also worked extensively in the area of Document Management (Documentum). But after more than 20 years in the IT business I can turn my hand to most things and have no problems learning new technologies. I was born in the city of Sheffield, South Yorkshire in northern England, but grew up from the age of 12 in the Cathedral town of Canterbury, Kent in the South East corner of England near to Dover. I went to university at The Hatfield Polytechnic, now known as The University of Hertfordshire. At University I took a keen interest in the Student Radio station, in those days called Campus Radio Hatfield - CRH. I worked first as a DJ then as Programme Controller and finally as the Station Manager. CRH is the oldest Student Radio station in the UK and started transmitting in 1960. These days the station is called Crush Radio and as well as still transmitting on 1278AM, as they have always done, they now also stream on-line. I was so interested in radio, at that time, that for my final year Computer Science project I attempted to design and build an automated playlist generator using HyperCard on a Mac Plus (those were the days). After graduating with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, I worked as an engineer at ABB in Stevenage. During my time at ABB I had the opportunity to work, for three years, on a project at one of their head offices in Västerås, Sweden. At the end of the assignment I decided that I liked it so much in Sweden that I would move there and take a job with ABB. That was in 2001 and things have moved on a bit since then, and I now work for Capgemini, an IT Consulting company who have their headquarters in Paris, France. As an IT Consultant at Capgemini I have worked on assignments for a variety of clients such as ABB (engineering), E.ON (power generation), AstraZeneca (pharmaceuticals), SLU (the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) and my current assignment is at Skatteverket (the Swedish Tax Office). I am a gadget junkie and always have to have the latest and greatest new toys. I currently own two Android phones and an Android tablet and run Ubuntu Linux on a server and two laptops at home. But as every real gadget junkie knows, there is also a downside to living on the cutting-edge which is that you very soon accumulate a veritable museum of old out of date gadgets that are no longer any use but you can't bring yourself to throw out. My museum is overflowing with gadgets such as a SonyEricsson P800 smartphone, SonyEricsson P900 and P990 smartphones, a Sony Mini-Disc walkman, a Nintendo GameBoy and GameBoy Advance, an original PlayStation, a Rio PMP300 MP3 player (one of the first commercially available MP3 players), an Archos Jukebox 6000 hard-disk based MP3 player and a Sony DVP-FX1 portable DVD player. All of them currently residing in various draws, boxes or up in the loft. I am now pretty fluent in Swedish, although it took a few years. |
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About me |