About Me
Why is it that writing about oneself always the hardest thing to do? Or at least so it seems when you really want to come across as terribly witty and interesting and not as a complete self-obsessed navel gazer - although at the moment I can see my navel very well as it is about 4-5 inches ahead of the rest of me and on the verge of popping.(15/04/08)The navel is now receding, Amelia Elizabeth arrived at 4:31am on the 12th of April. We are completely pwned. I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, my mother and father being American and Irish, an English Lecturer and Software Engineer respectively. I was nominally raised in the English Department of Trinity College in Dublin as my mother returned to do a Ph.D when I was 6 years old. As a result I attended Trinity myself but instead studied Engineering, specialising in Computer Engineering. When I finished in 2002, I’d been knocking about the college for nearly 17 years.I lived at home all through university, and so while I graduated just when the tech industry went in a post 9/11 slump I did managed to do so without the burden of student debt. In fact I ended up being married a few months before I got my pieces of paper from Trinity College Dublin.I now live in Biggleswade in England, having moved here just a few weeks after my university finals in 2002. Coincidently Biggleswade was one of the place names that had enthralled me when younger as an avid peruser of maps.I enjoy living in this semi-rural part of Bedfordshire, not least because it gives me the opportunity of going on the train a lot, which I’ve never done in Ireland aside from the DART, but because it is near to many of wonderful places such as Cambridge, where I work, and Hemingford Grey, the real-life inspiration for Lucy M. Boston’s Greene Knowe books.As a Computer Engineering graduate who has openly used Macs for 19 years I am an affirmed and some times unashamed geek, even to the point that I met my husband on IRC(#userfriendly on undernet.org in case you were wondering). I also meet certain nerd criteria in that I have seen and own alot of Star Trek, Star Wars and Stargate, as well as Quantum Leap, Sliders, MST3K, have a maths degree and so on.However as time has worn on I’ve tended to meander back to my arts and crafts hobbies and split my time between coding and general internet technology geeking and beading and knitting geekery. I’ve been beading for nearly 15 years and still make and sell pieces mainly at the yearly Craft Fair at Marley Park in Dublin. Attempts to quit IT work completely and take the plunge into full time beading have so far been frustrated by the lure of a steady income and my bizaare need to tinker with code and solve knotty problems.Despite having an extreme dislike and infamous reaction to exams I currently work for an exam board in the UK, unlike Ireland there are a number of exam boards so in a given year people taking say a maths exam will not all do the same one. I don’t set exams or anything like that, but rather I work for the IS department, as a web technology architect. It is a very interesting role and gives me not only the chance to work with some great people in the technical field especially as regards User Experience, but have also seen how exam boards do more than just setting and sending out and correcting paper.If I can stay awake long enough on the train I am an avid reader. I enjoy slightly esoteric, forgotten children’s literature which has sadly fallen by the way side some what in the Harry Potter stampede, such as Joan Aiken, Lucy M. Boston, Eleanor Farjeon and Barbara Sleigh. The first two are very proto-Potter indeed. I also enjoy Lindsey Davis’ Falco series and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels.I recently discovered Jasper Fforde and also devoured a large amount of Georgette Heyer which I credit for helping me maintain the ‘beautiful thoughts’ required to get me through one failed IUI attempt and the subsequent initial phase of my first pregnancy. I read a fair amount of Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci Series towards the end of the pregnancy.
