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Elgon

by Elgon (Curate)
on Oct 17, 2000 at 23:34 UTC ( [id://37222]=user: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

The image above was taken in July 2004 on Stickledown Range on Bisley Common in Surrey, UK.


About me:

Education - I was student at the University of Sheffield in the UK where I studied on the four year undergraduate master's (MChem) program in Chemistry with Study in Europe. I spent an academic year at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Clermont-Ferrand, France, before returning for my final year at Sheffield. I graduated on 25th July 2002. I also have an MBA from Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.

Programming - I've been programming Perl for about a decade on and off, but interest has been renewed because of a personal project I'm working on at the moment. I started programming, mostly in BASIC, when I was about nine and continued until I was 17 before taking a four-year break from it. I worked through summer 2000 at Zeus as an intern and learned about Linux, CGI, MySQL and Perl. Since then I've picked up a little bit of C and taught myself PHP for my final year project, which could (it was killed for some reason) be found here. I worked for a large consulting firm as an intern in London during the summer of 2001, doing Business Objects, ASP (VBS‎crip‎t and JavaS‎crip‎t) and lots of Excel. I started permanently with them March 10th 2003 and was recently promoted from Analyst to Consultant. I've done Sun Microsystems courses on Java and Enterprise JavaBeans, which were fascinating as I've only ever taught myself programming rather than being lectured and doing labs in a controlled environment. Interesting language though, but not as 'fun' or 'intuitive' as perl to program. The latest tools I've been working with are Korn Shell s‎crip‎ting (on Sun Solaris) and the Retek RDF/AIP suite of products, damn but it's good to learn new stuff. Most of my work is currently testing and debugging interfaces and custom mods for Demand Forecasting and Supply Chain systems.

I mostly use Perl these days to write stuff for fun or at work as a tool to take files in one format and convert them to another. This can be quite fun when someone else has previously said that this would be far too difficult to do, or would run far too slowly to be of any use. Given that the files I use in my work are largely text files, this now happens quite often. I spent the last three months of 2004 and the first two months of 2005 living in Atlanta, GA, although I am now back in the UK. I've been off Perlmonks for a while, as work and shooting have taken up a lot of my time recently.


Reading Material - I love to read: Anything from literature to actiony trash. I've got back into literature recently, with 'Orlando' by Virginia Woolf and 'Fury' by Salman Rushdie. I finally gave in and read Harry potter. *shame*. The Illumnatus! trilogy is another favourite (All hail Eris) but I've read 'SnowCrash', 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and have just got into Richard Morgan's 'Altered Carbon' books recently.

Music - I'll listen to just about anything worth listening to but my favourites include: Led Zep, TheThe, TalkTalk, Beethoven, Tallis, The Smiths, Duran Duran, Guns 'n' Roses, The Cult, Barenakedladies, Andreas Wollenweider, Pulp, Blur, Lloyd Cole, Bjork and The Chemical Brothers, Fleetwood Mac and Kruder & Dorfmeister. I've been listening to a lot of classical music recently as I'm totally disillusioned with the state of current pop.

I'm also a minor hi-fi freak and have a reasonably serious system with a generic CD player/transport, TAG McLaren Preamp with DAC, John Linsley-Hood Monbloc power amps and (the weakest link) a pair of Tannoy 762's.

Sports - Target rifle shooting. I shoot fullbore (highpower) internationally and smallbore badly. My ambition is to have shot the 'Big 5' matches (National, Mackinnon, Kolapore, Australia and Palma) - I've made four out of the five so far. I won the 2004 and 2005 Welsh Championships and represented Wales in the Fullbore Individual and Pairs Events at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia, the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, and the World-Championship winning Great Britain Palma Rifle Team at the 2007 World Long Range Championships in Ottawa. I'll be going to the 2011 WLRC with GB later this year.

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