Hobbies
Orienteering and Running
I, as a member of Wimborne Orienteers, am often to be found in a forest, on a moor, or in a town, running with a map and compass. I have planned an event for the Dorset Schools League and I am regularly involved with the organisation and computing at orienteering events.
Since 2006 I have been blogging about the orienteering and running races I have attended. In 2011 I attended 27 races; 2010: 38 races; 2009: 39; 2008: 38; 2007: 40; 2006: 28; and you can follow my progress in 2012.
Personal Bests
1M – 5:48
5k – 19:56
5M – 37:03
10K – 44:30
10M – 73:10
Half Marathon – 94:53
Marathon – 4:53:30
Reading
For the last few years I have been taking part in the 50 Book Challenge – i.e. to read 50 books in a year. For this I only counts the books I read for the first time. In 2011 I read 134 books; 2010: 128 books; 2009: 105; 2008: 83; 2007: 54; 2006: 54; 2005: 41; and you can follow my progress in 2012.
Computing
Computers form an important part of my life. For my research I use C and C++. These languages are ideally suited for the mathematical computations involved in the modelling. The growing importance of large systems means that I use MPI and OpenMP to produce code which works efficiently on large computer systems.
Over the last ten years I have also built up an extensive knowledge of web development. I have experience of
PHP,
Perl,
Ruby,
Rails,
Javascript,
HTML,
CSS, and SQL. My
websites and web projects gives an overview of some of the websites and web projects that I have contributed to.
Important in using all of these languages has also been learning to effectively use the available support tools for programming. Such tools as
Git,
Subversion,
Trac,
Bugzilla, and many others.
The Photos
At various orienteering events Chris and Simon Branford take photographs. These are available at
my account on
flickr.com. A random selection appears at the top of the column on the right. If you have any comments or queries concerning these photographs please
contact me.
