I work for a PR agency, so it made sense to find out about blogs as a way of directly communicating with public audiences. Prior to falling into this game I worked in a number of roles, from McDonalds prep rooms building racks of frozen chips for frying, to heading a shift team in an oil refinery and a brief spell in marketing for financial institutions. Probably the role that was closest to my heart was club DJ, because of my love of music. I still like to step behind the wheels of steel and play the latest jackin’ cuts with some classics and some surprises just to keep people guessing. I guess this kind of gives you an idea of the lens through which I view the world when I write the posts: * An inquisitive nature * A love of reading instilled by my parents * An engineers view of quality from my Dad * Being a stranger-in-a-strange-land having come from an Irish household in the middle of the UK * A contrary outlook on life coming from being an only child * Being a counter-culture fanboy I found my way into technology mainly because I wasn’t afraid of it, rather than any real ability. I learned about technology in a very hands on way because there wasn’t any budget for an IT department in many of the early companies where I worked. I got experience on Macs, mainframes, DEC VAX mini-computers IBM and SGI UNIX boxes during five years or so in industry. I had my first email address early in 1994 when I contracted for Corning Optical Fibres. In the tradition of the early net, I was a number rather than a name. I also managed to send my first spam email pretty soon after as I tried to offload some unwanted Marks and Spencers vouchers on my unsuspecting colleagues. Corning’s HR were more concerned that I was creating and selling counterfeit vouchers (I wasn’t, but then I would say that wouldn’t I?) rather than the act of spamming itself. I took up technology that made a difference to my life: pagers, mobile phones, PDAs and Mac laptops. I am not very talented in the programming skills area, but was self-taught to write macros in Lotus 1-2-3 to automate lab equipment (so I had more time to do my chart returns from the work fax machine to record promotion agencies) , but that was well over over a decade ago and I have forgotten more in that time than I’ll ever know again.