About Me

I am Some Random Nerd-I live in London, and I work in research/insight for a media agency.

To qualify my self-proclaimed Nerd status; I like to play with computers and do things like doodle in Photoshop and write excel macros and call it fun. I've watched Star Wars more times than I could possibly imagine, even though I know pretty much everything about the films off by heart (I actually believe I was the first person in the world to watch all six episodes back to back in the right order- with my wife, on the day Episode 3 was released.) I've watched all of the directors commentaries on all of the Lord of the Rings DVDs (the "special" 4 disc versions.) I have edited pages on Wikipedia. I built my own website to ramble about my thoughts and opinions before people started calling them "blogs." I've had a mobile phone since 1996 and been using my phone to surf the internet since 2001. I've read all the Harry Potter books, but haven't seen any of the films because they don't interest me. On the other hand, I've read all the His Dark Material books and seen the film, and I'm hoping that they make another two, but stay a bit more faithful to the books and don't turn all the ambiguous characters into black and white, good or evil characters. And I'm not embarassed about any of that. In other words, I think do pretty much anything that you would call nerdy- hence the screen name "SomeRandomNerd."

(Except for Star Trek. I don't really do Star Trek.)

Although I do enjoy getting involved in web design work, I’m mainly interested in the coding side— making pages that work well is more important to me than making them look good. (I'm sure most people would rather see an ugly site than a pretty but broken or unusable one.) But my aim is to be able to do everything involved in designing, creating and selling websites, with the ultimate goal of running my own agency.

I’m a strong believer in web standards, so I make my sites using HTML with CSS to control the presentation. For the behind the scenes, server-side, techy stuff, I use PHP with MySQL. I’m still learning about Javascript, but as my main focus is on making accessible sites (particularly for use on as wide a range of devices as possible), mastering it isn't yet a priority.

I'm also really into the open source philosophy of software development; I prefer to work in Linux where possible, although I’m still finding my way, so expect some blog entries about that too.

At some stage, I will probably start using Dreamweaver for the design- however, I want to know about how all the code actually works; I don’t want to find myself in a position where I need a particular application to build a site, and I'd rather be an expert in web coding than simply an expert at using Dreamweaver. So at the moment I’m doing all my coding in either Notepad++ (which I like because of it’s colour-coding style, and the way it can easily switch between language schemes) or Bluefish.

I've also been interested in photography since my wife and I bought ourselves a digital SLR camera last year, and I use Flickr to keep my photos.