I was born in 1973 in Christchurch, New Zealand - the little speck on the map to the right of Australia :-) My father worked as a geotechnical engineer and my mother looked after the kids (a full time career in itself!). At around age 7 our family moved to Hong Kong where my father worked for the Hong Kong Government on a 5 year contract.

In the early 80s my father brought home an Apple II clone, (clones were popular in HK) which became our first family computer. I was about 10 years old at the time. It wasn't long before I was drawing geometric shapes in Logo & writing small programs in BASIC. One of the first programs I wrote read values from an analog joystick converting them into sound. I recall, as a kid, typing a similar program into an Apple IIc at a computer store in San Francisco during a family vacation and freaking out the salesman. I guess he thought I'd broken it :-) The result sounded like a chainsaw but that didn't matter to me - I was hooked on the idea of making computers do interesting stuff.

Fast forward about 10 years. In the early 90s I was back in New Zealand using computers to write music and starting to design my first web sites. I received my bachelors degree, double majoring in psychology and sociology. One of my favorite subjects in psychology was ergonomics, where I learned a lot about human-machine interfaces and the importance of affordance in design. Around that time I worked as a professional musician and taught guitar at a Maori language school and to private students. Most of my computer use at this time was audio related.

In the mid 90s I met Mary, the woman who is now my wife. We were both at university at the time. She studied in New York at SUNY Albany, and I was at University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. We met on IRC (Internet Relayed Chat) on a channel called #England. We struck up a friendship through email which blossomed into a romance. Finally we got to meet in person when I flew over to the United States to visit her for 5 weeks. Then, she visited me in New Zealand for 6 months. We got engaged, I moved to the United States and we were married shortly after. We've lived in the United States ever since.

In 2000, my wife and I started a small business selling antiques and vintage clothing, furniture & accessories online (eBay being the main channel). She handled the procurement and item descriptions and I managed the Web Site, photography and shipping.

Throughout this period, much of my time as a developer was focused on projects closely related to our core business. For example, I had written a content management system in Perl to keep track of business' inventory and customer payments. Since many of our vintage goods came from local yard and estate sales I wrote scripts that would automatically extract data from the local newspaper's yardsale listings, geocoding the addresses for importing to a handheld GPS. Some of the techniques I learned ended up being published in "Tricks of the eBay Masters", a QUE publication by Michael Miller.

Around the same time I'd discovered Linux and all of the amazing open source applications that came with it. I've been using Mandriva Linux as my primary OS since Version 8.1 (back when it was still called Mandrake) though I keep a Windows box handy for testing purposes.

I found the thing that I loved most about our business was coding applications to automate various processes. So, in 2006 I started developing Web Sites and Applications for others as an independent contractor. You can see some of the fruits of my labor in the portfolio section of this Web Site. Gradually, I saw more repeat business and now freelance Web development is what I do full time.

I'm passionate about my work and technology in general. I've performed contract work for businesses large and small across the United States and locally. Nothing pleases me more than a job well done and knowing that I've been able to help a client achieve their goals through the use of technology.