Self-employed 
Freelance Contractor

Currently

Contracted to CityLink as Product Development Manager

Previously

Projects Delivered Articles published Technologies Learnt & Used. After two tumultuous years in Telecom I began to miss some of the more hands-on (keyboard) activities that I had enjoyed in the past. The work I was doing was more abstract, and while I enjoy that kind of work and thinking, it is not enough alone to satisfy my curiousity and need to viscerally understand the technologies I work with.

More, I was intrigued by some of the concepts in the book "The Empty Raincoat" by Charles Handy, which suggested there were ways to work outside of the normal routine, leveraging the power of the Internet so that an individual could promote, arrange work and thrive on-line.

With much less planning and preparation than was wise, I took the step out of the regular job market and went freelance. I had carefully established limits on the amount of time and money I would spend on this activity and assured I had some seed work with colleagues who were forming a company to focus on mobile data applications, Synapse Group.

This break was also an opportunity to write more, and thereby gain a degree of exposure for my other pursuits.

During this period I took the opportunity to study and experiment with a number of technologies which are having a significant impact.

While I had been using Linux and Apache for sometime in a small way, I wanted to know more about PHP, and SQL, particularly the free software implementation MySQL, which seems likely to rise to the same prominence as an alternative to proprietary software as Linux has done.

I used the Internet to assemble information and Synapse Group gave me a commission to produce a working system to support SMS text inquiries to a database of vehicle information.

The project was to be a rapid-development of a working prototype, and I put together a system that accepted email requests and returned a result.

To try the system email: 

To: ltsa@jx.co.nz
Subject: IAU6849
No other information is required. Mink (Mobile Inquiry) should return the successful result on the subject line, where the first number is the axle count and the second just a fake "meter reading." (Performance is limited by the system being hosted on a system at home where I have a Jetstart connection).

On completion of that project I was asked to produce a system relating to a specification for online text gaming (quiz style), but was asked to repurpose it for generic content which I have done, and it is delivering "X of the Day" content to a small number of test subscribers.

Other study involved learning and using XML which is now beginning to rise in popularity as it does for data and autonomous entities what the Internet did for networking, and HTML did for on-line publishing.