These “About Me” pages usually include lots of not-very interesting information about not-very interesting bloggers, so who am I to buck the trend?
I’m not going to prattle-on too much about myself. I’ll leave the verbal diarrhoea to my blog posts.
Well, I’m a Yorkshireman by birth and rather bloody proud of that fact, thank-you very much. I was born in the famous Jimmy’s in Leeds in the very late 60s and was dragged up by my superb parents in Roundhay (initially) and then Headingley. We lived within easy parking distance to the cricket/rugby ground. Which was nice on Test Match days.
Once I left school after my A-levels I spurned the chance of a University education and headed for the much more exciting lifestyle choice of military service in the Royal Air Force. I was a telecommunications technician and I served at RAF Coningsby (7 years) and RAF Brize Norton (TCW).
I really enjoyed my time of service but decided that I’d be better leaving at 30 rather than signing on for a further 10 years, so I left and became a System Proving Engineer for Marconi in Beeston, Nottingham. The powers-that-be in Marconi made some shockingly bad business decisions and the company ended up going down the toilet, only for Ericsson to turn up and take us over. I’m still here now. It’s a good job and I enjoy the work.
I currently spend a lot of time testing SDH systems in a lab environment. It’s a “whole system” test so much of our testing is aimed at the management systems rather than the Network Elements themselves, although we do have to know a bit about those too. Lots of Unix and a dash of Linux these days too. Some more modern communications protocols are invading our safe SDH haven and we’re having to figure out how all the TCP/IP data stuff works too. It’s very interesting and keeps the old brain ticking over nicely.
I’ve had mixed success in my personal life. I’ve been married and divorced (like so many people) but I’m now in a very happy relationship with an extremely lovely young lady called Jo. I shan’t be expounding too greatly on such things on this page.
I have an unhealthy love for brass bands and photography. I sometimes do both at the same time, although it’s extremely hard to play my cornet while trying to take a photo. I play with a Nottingham-based brass band called Carlton Brass and I love it! I have a Canon Eos 400D and really enjoy taking photos of all sorts of weird stuff.
This blog is just going to be a bit of a brain dump. I like to write but my writing style tends to me a partially incoherent stream of conciousness, something I’m hoping to improve on. I’ve been lazy with my blogging recently but I do intend to write more opinion pieces on various topics of interest.
Here ends “About Me”