At college I was hopeless at FORTRAN. It wasn't the only thing I was hopeless at, but it was the only one that motivated my post-doc tutors to suggest IT was a career no-go zone. (As a thoroughly disrespectful undergrad I never paid anything like as much attention them as I should have). FORTRAN's the Latin of scripting, and in a world before Excel we used it to write statistical analysis software to process data from our science experiments. It generally took longer to write the code than it did to gather the data. Odd looking back on that; like having to build a car so you can drive to the supermarket. (And the postgrads still had a punched card reader in the corner of the lab; one that real purists would now bid a fortune for on eBay).

So that was it, I ripped up my passwords to JANET and safely headed off into the worlds of communication, content and commerce, happy that the most I'd be using PCs for was email and some of those new stats packages that looked like they'd do a much better job at crunching numbers than any of the scripts I was writing.

I was a media geek at college, spending more time running the newspaper and guidebooks, or helping out at the local radio, than I did in the lab (a fact not unnoticed by one of my professors who caught me doing a radio travel bulletin when I was "at home" making good on another of his essays that hadn't gotten in in time). As a kid I loved newspapers; my first job when I was 14 was delivering them, and by a year later I was writing the local film reviews for them. In my late teens I got them to sponsor the local hospital's radio which I helped run in the evenings. The Beeb's studios were just round the corner from our house which made for some great placements, and it was only on the toss of a coin that I took a place at uni, turning down a traineeship in film editing. It was in the family and in my blood. Sure, I was one of the first kids to get a ZX81 and an overjoyed one when it's memopack upgrade (all 16k of it) arrived. But computing was just another media channel.

So that's how, in 94, I started to get sucked into this new world; a passion for media and enough FORTRAN to be dangerous. During the first digital decade I've been lucky enough to work with some real smart people, on real interesting projects. Film editing skills have proved to be as useful as radio management, and stats analysis as useful as writing for the press. Like most in the dotcom space there have been a few clanging flops along the way, as well as a few modest successes.

As we journey towards the digital networked world, I'm just another hitchhiker you're meeting along the way. The postings were private at first, a sort of personal scrapbook of some of the stuff that started happening around me, some stuff that felt like it mattered, some stuff I just didn't want to forget. They were my diaries, photographs, emailed postcards home, and the sort of rambling thoughts that readily now fill the blogsphere. Then a couple of friends asked (well to be honest, bullied) me into sharing a few of them. You can find out more about this blog in About This Blog

Enjoy.