About Me

Hello and thanks for taking the time to look around.

Me

First and foremost I’m a father.

After that, in no particular order, I’m a DNS geek; an Enterprise Architect; a Motorsport UK Incident Officer; a Motorsport UK Clerk of the Course; and a photographer.

Motorsport

I’ve always been interested in motorsport. I’d seen those folks in orange on the telly and had occasionally wondered how you got involved in that.

Then, in about 1999 a friend and I were chatting at a car club meeting and he said he was going to a marshal training day the following weekend.

It never occurred to me that you could just turn up, volunteer, and be a marshal.

So I started going. I enjoyed it. I made a lot of friends.

After a number of years “on the bank”, I started to get more involved in the running of the race days, working in Race Control in a variety of roles, and eventually completed the training to become a Clerk of the Course for circuit racing events.

I completed the first phase of that, with my license upgraded to “Deputy” status, and from the start of the 2025 season I’ve added the Assistant (training/probationary) category for “Speed” events which for me is predominantly allowing me to rediscover my love of hill climbs.

Career

I’m very lucky to have a job that is mostly like getting paid to do a hobby. Does it have its days? Of course. But I’ve never woken up disliking the fact that it’s a work day. Occasionally (ok, more often than that) I wake up disliking the fact that Oxford’s traffic is between me and the office!

I have a background in the design and operations of large scale critical infrastructure and services, mostly involving DNS, DNSSEC, BGP, etc.

I’m not a software developer, but I can get by in perl, python, and a bunch of similar things. I’m currently kinda learning Go.

Photographer

I enjoy spending time behind the camera. However, I often pick officiating at Motorsport events instead of photograhing them, for example.

Years ago I learnt from research, enthusiastic friends and a pro I knew, to spend as much as you can afford to on the glass, the body should be mostly a secondary consideration. It’s not quite that simple, but you get the idea.

No amount of money spent on a great body can make light appear at the back of poor glass.

So, I started with a Canon 20D, I picked up a 24-70L f/2.8 with the body. A friend was upgrading and sold me a used but great condition 70-200L IS f/2.8 with a 1.4x teleconverter and I was set.

More recently I was very luck to overhear a friend at the office talking about having just bought themselves a new DSLR and I enquired if what they were replacing and were they selling… TL;DR is that I now have a Canon 5DMkIII in excellent condition, and they threw in the 50mm f/1.8 with it because they’d jumped ship to Sony and had no use for the 50mm any more.

What you’ll find here

Mostly what you’ll find here is stuff I think I should write down. This usually happens when I’ve either searched for something and couldn’t easily find it, or I just fancy writing a post on something I’ve done or am doing.

If I’ve found a few minutes to tinker with the camera, there may be pictures to look at too!