I was born in 1972 in Murwillumbah, a small hard-to-spell town in Australia, where I spent the first 18 years of my life before moving to Sydney in 1991, where I lived and sporadically worked until mid 2005, at which point I moved to Auckland, New Zealand where I now work as a famous software engineer. I’ve come to terms with the fact that most of my life has been spent in front of a computer monitor, but my eyeballs will never forgive me.

I first started coding around 1986, on an Amstrad CPC464 (Z80 processor, 64K RAM including 16K video memory, tape drive for storage), messing around with BASIC and later a bit of z80 machine code, using a hand-rolled assembler— my first, reasonably successful stab at a compiler. Then I discovered girls and lost interest in computers, which in hindsight was a terrible mistake since all I really did was mope around being a moody teenager wondering why nobody understood me.

Five years later (after dropping out of a design school in Sydney) I found myself unemployed and somewhat directionless, and so used the opportunity to rediscover computers and starting working with QuickBasic and x86 assembler, then C, then C++… which is where I stayed. I helped develop a 3D software engine for a strange company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment, where we busily poured money down the toilet prior to the dot-com crash, with the intention of developing interactive 3D movies. Google Cyberswine if you want to know more about that.

Many years later I’m still coding in C++ and working on 3D conversion and rendering for a medium sized company in NZ. I also have a bunch of my own software I just barely maintain, over at Jujusoft (all in perpetual beta) as well as a unique little driving demo called Drivey which I created a few years back, and plan to one day expand into a functional game (I’ve been saying that for about 5 years now).

But it’s not all about programming…

I like to draw occasionally too, and am quite likely to write half a novel someday. In the late 90s I wanted to write screenplays, and got quite fired up about it… until I realized I didn’t have the requisite hunger and talent to see something like that through. In general I think it’s a good thing that I’m not driven by success so much as the desire to do interesting things.

I’m an occasionally vocal atheist and strong advocate of skeptical/rational thinking. I think that God is a ridiculous concept, and that religion is on the whole detrimental to anyone seeking knowledge and wisdom. I feel outright contempt for Scientology, new Age-ism and most modern religions, because these don’t even come with any cultural heritage— they’re just bullshit which add nothing of value to the world.

I won’t try to enumerate all the stuff I’m into here, since that’s the point of keeping a blog. I started it in August 2002, and am quite glad that I did— it’s great to have a record of what I’ve been thinking about, and blogging has prompted me to explore ideas more thoroughly as well (although it hasn’t improved my writing ability as much as I originally hoped).