About Me

My email contact is mesmacat [ 'at' ] hotmail.com.

About me
I am 44 years old and was born and raised in the United Kingdom, growing up in Haywards Heath, a West Sussex commuter town, and spending most of my teenage years in London.

After living for a year in Brighton, I emigrated to Australia in 1988 to join my first wife. While I have spent the majority of the past 22 years in Australia, I have spent a number of years overseas either traveling or working in the United Kingdom, including nearly seven years of the past decade. I have traveled whenever the opportunity has been available and more details about some of the places I have visited are in the Places page on this website.

I currently live in Melbourne, Australia where I work in RMIT in the Research area as a contractor on various administration projects including Common Research Centres and IP and commercialisation.



Professional Life
My first career was in video production and computer graphics. I worked in a video studio as a production runner and graphics assistant, for a presentation graphics company and then for a R&D computer graphics company. I also undertook production work across this period, including a title sequence for an Australian mini series and animation for corporate videos.

During the first part of the 1990s I studied for a BA in Literary Theory and Media Studies. After completing my studies I worked for a number of years as desk top publisher, office trouble shooter and general office dogsbody, eventually specialising in Microsoft Office documentation and templates.

During the first seven years of the past decade I worked in investment banking, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas and Chase Manhattan primarily working on pitch books and presentations but also spending some time leading teams of desktop publishers or running satellite desk top publishing operations on the banking floor.

Upon my return to Melboune in 2007, I worked in the Nursing School of La Trobe University for nearly four years, most of the time administering a professional attachment program for close to 1,000 students. I am currently working as a contract documentation and administration troublshooting specialist in Melbourne. 

Cooking
This is a recently discovered pleasure. For many years I had a repotore consisting of Spaghetti Bolognese, curry in a jar with lamb or chicken, and or meat and two veg (or often one veg and sometimes... no veg). I picked up a few other variations from being married to a professional cook for a time, such as how to make salad dressing and the fact that there are more varieties of cheese than cheddar, but otherwise have had pretty much a desperado bachelor mentality towards cooking for the greater part of my life.

Recently I was living with a friend who has been experimenting with cooking and was inspired by him to try to experiment with other dishes myself. So far the results have generally been good and I guess on a purely quantitive measure, if I had three dishes previously and now triple, perhaps I while I might not be triple the man I was previously, if I eat like this on a regular basis, will certainly be at least double the width.


Computer games
I have been playing computer games since the age of 9 and grew up in the Space Invader/Asteroids era when they were becoming widespread in arcades and other locations and were entering popular culture in films such as Tron and Wargames. I describe something of the thrill of that era in a blog post from The Devil's P.A. blog: My Life in Computer Games Part 1. I never wrote a part two or further, but perhaps I will one day.

Principally I play shooters, particuarly those with a Science Fiction or horror bent and free roaming Fantasy Role Playing games. The shooters are  bit of arenalin but the Role Playing Games are more a sense of enjoying wandering around in an imaginary reality being able to explore as I wish.

My interest in games is not entirely jsut about whittling away hours aimlessly, I see them an emerging artiform and cultural practice I am always interested to see what is been done in gaming and sometime buy games simply to have a look at what is being achieved.

Film trivia

I will typically spend an hour or two each week looking up what films are approaching release, what is in development or production, the background of the actors and directors and reading or watching interviews with them. I cannot really explain the appeal of this activity - certainly most of this knowledge has no apparent value other than being exceptionally useful for boring folks at parties.

Meditation
I was taught this when younger and have of late been returning to it as a regular practice. I usually sit for 30 minutes first thing in the morning and 30-45 minutes when returning from work or just before bed.

Sometimes if I am writing and feel frustrated with what I am working on, I will sit quietly for a while and then return to the work - it often seems to help.

Wikipedia
At the beginning of 2009 I started to write and edit articles on Wikipedia (more about this in the Non Fictions section of this website). I was attracted to this partly because I wanted to brush up my non fiction writing skills and partly because contributing to the community without payment aligns with my personal values.

I haven't done much work on Wikipedia in the past year, but still reviewed pages I have contributed to and brush up on them or correct errors and typos from other editors.