Special effects janitor and small time grifter

Welcome to my small area of the TDV web site. Having found your way thus far you can either: Sit back and enjoy the ramblings of a slightly mad pikilotherm or Rush off to the drinks cabinet and enjoy life more, in the presence of Jack D himself.

Well, who am I and how do I come to be here in TDV land? As you can see I’m a groovy kinda kid who’s keen on programming and three dimensional computer graphics. Having left my home and family in Harrogate at the age of eighteen with A’levels tucked neatly in my napsack, I ventured south on my journey to world domination. A quick stop in London to earn a degree in Computer Science with leanings towards mathematics (with a couple of awards thrown in) prepared me for a high flying job at… wait for it…. Hemel Hempstead.

I joined the growing group of madcap programmers at a company called Computer Concepts who were into assembly language programming and absolutely everything to do with applications authoring. We few, we happy few, spent many hours pouring over operating system manuals in dimly lit rooms at the back of a huge country manor, atop a hill, not far from the A5. It was here that I helped in the production of a number of top selling software titles for the Acorn market. Impression, a document processor I worked on won one of the annual ‘Best of Year’ awards bestowed on the Computer market by PCW. A second package, Artworks, was heralded as one of the best design and illustration packages in the business at the time of its launch.

Having spent five years writing a large number of applications/operating system extensions and debugging tools, I then joined the new religion, which had taken root in the company. With the onset of clean 32bit hardware and memory model in the PC arena, a group was created to begin programming a new illustration package for that platform. I joined this group about a year into its work and took to a new C++ programming language like a fish to the hot tarmac of Heathrow. OK, so I did rather better than the fish, but I’m sure not by much. A year later the software finally came to market in the guise of CorelXARA, marketed by the mighty Corel Corporation.

And that's how I come to be at ‘The Digital Village. My move to the PC provided me with some new skills in demand outside Hemel Hempstead and thus I’ve moved south once again, back to London. I now spend my days excitedly constructing CokeCan statues and offering my services in the mad dash to the Coffee shop across the high street (mentioning no names). I’ve even been known to work some. I’m still keen on low level assembler programming and bit twiddling but now it’s all aimed at intel achitectures such as the crazy Pentium and PentiumII, don’t you just love the U and V pipe lines? Instruction pipeline interocks seem to keep me awake at nights.

For the future, I have plans to follow in the footsteps of John Lasseter or Jim Blinn and create a Midnight Graphics Group concerned in the long term with world domination but as a short term goal, the production of Oscar wining films using super cool three dimensional computer graphics. So head in the clouds as usual eh?
Thanks for listening. See you all at my House warming.

Mike

For more information about this fine company I work for, go and have a scout around some of my colleges web pages Oh go on you know you want to.