About: Paul
My super-short, in a nutshell bio reads: Englishman living in Canada; Scrum Master / Agile project manager; Linux geek; F1 fan; badminton player; photographer.
Let me expand on these things in turn:
- Englishman living in Canada
I grew up in Bedfordshire (about 40 miles north of London), went to university in the north-west of England, then moved south again for work. (See my résumé / CV for more info!) Kerri and I met in 1999; I moved to Toronto (where she was already living) in 2001 and we got married a year later. - Scrum Master / Agile project manager
A Scrum Master is the Agile world’s somewhat-equivalent of a project manager. I believe Scrum and Agile are the right way to run software projects – it’s about building a good relationship with your customer and giving them frequent incremental updates until you deliver what they want, as opposed to the “keep the customer in the dark then surprise them” approach of more traditional Waterfall projects. - Linux geek
Well, geek in general but Linux is my operating system of choice. I started playing with computers back in the 1970s; I’ve used with CP/M, DR-DOS, MS-DOS and virtually all flavours of Windows, but my preference has always been for UNIX and, more recently, Linux. There are moregorygeeky details for those who are brave enough. - F1 fan
I’m a huge fan of motor racing, especially Formula One (I’ve driven Silverstone’s Formula One circuit, home of the British Grand Prix!) and British Touring Cars, although I’ve not seen much of the BTCC since I emigrated. Having said that, I haven’t owned a car since I moved to Canada! I go to the Toronto car show (sorry, the Canadian International Auto Show) most years but the TTC makes getting around pretty easy. - badminton player
This one is self-explanatory, I suspect.
I’m also the webmaster for the club’s website; it’s a very small & simple site so I still hand-code the HTML!
- photographer
Since I bought a digital SLR (a Canon Rebel XTi) in 2007, photography has consumed about as much time as my geek endeavours! I take a lot of photos and do minimal processing, so you’ll find frequent additions to my Flickr account; here are some of the latest shots:However, I know that I post a lot more than most people can keep up with, so I created a “best of” photo-blog which I’ve called The Pick Of My Pics; I tend to post just one photo every couple of weeks, so the volume is much more manageable.
- What else….?
As per the stereotypical geek image, I’m in to “classic” rock and see bands live quite often. Rather than try to explain my taste in music, take a look at the list of gigs I’ve been to and see for yourself. Here’s who I listen to the most:
- Where to find me
I’m signed up with all sorts of sites, so I created a “where to find me” page – this list the main places I update, but you can also find a summary of those updates in the “lifestream” that runs down the side of this blog.
