The Furnace: About the Fire Angel.

A portrait of me; OK it isn't a very good one, when I get a better image I'll replace this but at least it gives a rough idea of what I look like.

Location and origins

I live in London, England. Originally I came to London in early February 1982 intending to be here for a long weekend, but I was hit by a car and spent nine months in various London hospitals during the rest of 1982. At that point my old rented home was no longer available and I was assisted by a hospital social worker to find a place to live in London. I now consider that accident to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, since it introduced me to life in this city. OK, London has its disadvantages (like any big city) but I love it. It has millions of people in it and I love people (except when they are all getting in my way walking down Oxford Street).

I was born in 1960 in the town of Folkestone, in the south east corner of England, of English parents. I lived most of my early life in the vicinity of Folkestone, gradually finishing up with six brothers and a sister. No, Louise isn't the youngest - some people just don't know when to stop and my mother is one of them.

In early 1996 I was diagnosed with cancer but survived it, in fact since those days I have been stopped for speeding by the Police - on a bicycle! Although it is not as rare as you might think for cyclists to break the speed limit, it is unusual to be stopped by the Police for it. Actually it made my day, especially after being ill for several years after the cancer. This entailed infections, the post-operative infection after one of my operations, more infections, tons of unpleasant but necessary drugs, and lying around a lot being waited upon. Being waited on by friends and nurses was OK but I would have passed it up to avoid the ill health (oh yeah, and Louise cleaned my cooker when I couldn't because I couldn't stand up for long enough - Louise is my sister).

A strange talent

This one's fun and yes, I am going to boast about it; I have a talent for doing things that experienced professionals tell me can't be done. I've lost count of the number of times a computer professional will very confidently tell me I can't do something with the equipment/software/experience level I have, or that nobody can do it because it's impossible, and then within a few days, or sometimes a few hours, I've done it. It's partly the folly of humanity that the word impossible is much overused by people who think that if they can't work out how to do something with all their training and experience, then surely nobody can.

The first time I can recall that I did one of these "impossible" tasks was in 1987 and it only took about a week of programming. Back then a 16MHz 386 was a fast computer, and a 40MB hard disk was an extremely expensive item that few home users could realistically dream about. I was using a Sinclair QL, an 8MHz 8-bit machine with 640K of RAM (don't laugh, that was a lot then) and no hard disk. I saw a molecular graphics program running that required a IBM PC or compatible machine with a hard disk to use as a framestore for producing those nice animated rotating molecules that mainframe molecular graphics programs could produce using a 6,000 dollar graphics card. I mentioned to one chap that I was thinking of writing a program that could produce those animations on my QL, and he, an experienced professional programmer, firmly announced that the QL could never do it because it wasn't powerful enough.

Within a week I had a Glucose molecule spinning on my QL screen, and yes, the molecular graphics program was eventually published. It was pirated to death with the result that I never made any money, and the publisher that was going to pay me royalties went bankrupt just before they were going to send me my first cheque. In the end I made it a free program to stop the pirates making money out of it. Oh well... Although now the 3D graphics look a little primitive my program was the first to give a proper 3D display of molecular structures on a computer costing under a thousand pounds sterling, as well as the first to work without requiring a specialist graphics card or a hard disk; a predecessor program that inspired me was pretty good too, but needed a hard disk if you wanted animation.

An example from the recent past was getting rigged cables to work in E-Frontier Poser software; the item I wanted to work was pronounced impossible by one of the technical support people at E-Frontier, but took me about two hours to get working once I began the task. I wanted a jointed mechanism of a gun mount to have a cable joining the fixed base to the rear of the gun, representing a power cable; "Poser can't do that" I was told, but I did it anyway. Now there are other Poser figures on sale with that exact feature, and I expect there will be more too.

Another recent example is on this web site; my gallery pages. I wanted a Javascript and HTML gallery with scrolling thumbnails, clickable to change the main image being viewed, with no browser detection code to keep it really simple, but I also wanted it to work in all the major browsers. "Can't be done; you'll have to put in some browser detection because they implement dynamic page elements differently" Mr. Experienced Web Programmer told me. Well it works in Opera, iCab, FireFox, Safari, NetScape, SeaMonkey and yes, even the dreaded Micro$oft Internet Exploder, all without a bit of browser detection. I had to send him a link when it was done, naturally...

Well life doesn't always present such cast iron opportunities for gloating, so when it does grab them!

Another strange talent

I don't know why, but I have a rare talent for persuading people to talk to me; especially shy people. If I go to a party and there's a terminally shy individual sitting in a corner somewhere too nervous to speak to anyone, I'll sometimes go and sit near them. Within minutes they will be talking as if we'd known each other for years, and many times I've heard a startled comment after as little as twenty minutes; "Oh my goodness I've never told anyone that before" or something similar. People will sometimes tell me things within minutes of first meeting that they wouldn't tell people they have known for years. I'm not sure what I do that allows this to happen, but I like it. No, I won't tell you any of the juicy things people have parted with...

Nature and interests

My friend Valerie once said of me "He's definitely a non standard item": I think it was intended as a compliment and in any case I take it as one. I am energetic with a wide variety of interests and a slightly warped sense of humour. I am known for being very kind to my friends and I don't seem to have enemies much if at all. I am also an information sponge with insatiable curiosity and a keen interest in studying many apparently unrelated subjects, and sometimes I talk too much (some would say often). I love answering questions, especially complicated ones, unfortunately the people around me don't seem to have quite got the hang of only asking me the questions I can actually answer, which reduces the opportunities for showing off. Oh well.

I am interested in art, music, maths and physics, science and science fiction, computers, graphic design and typography, architecture and most of all I am interested in people. My activities in life include or have included drawing and painting, computer programming, photography, computer graphics, woodcarving (not for years but I might get back to it), rock climbing, running, cycling, wargames, cooking (love cooking for friends), songwriting, dressmaking from my own designs (no commissions I do it for girlfriends or special friends only as a rule), various sorts of design work, teaching and writing both fiction and factual articles. I love people and I enjoy the company of both adults and children, so I suppose you'd call me very sociable. I have been known to complain about the human need for sleep and the fact that there are only twenty four hours in a day.

Art

I love to draw, I love to paint, I love to make computer graphics artwork and 3d computer graphics models. If you look in the pencil drawings gallery you'll see two of my drawings of babies; I love drawing baby portraits, the younger the better. It is one of my minor ambitions in life to draw a portrait in the first hour of a baby's life, which is difficult to arrange - I've been trying for years to arrange it so far without success.

I do a fair amount of performing now on the London live poetry circuit performing my own poems, and I go down well most of the time. Performing suits my love of showing off and the audiences are great, so they must be enjoying it too. I do meet some lovely characters doing this too, both among the poets and among the audiences.

At heart I am an artist who loves to entertain and I hope you like the images in my galleries; the galleries will continue to grow at an irregular rate like the rest of this web site.

Please do e-mail me if you want to comment on anything on this web site.