Experience & Qualifications
 Education
and Background
I was born British but now I would say I'm a world citizen, or
at least a European. I grew up in Greece and attended a US American
high school in Athens. After a brief stint at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon, I studied Greek language, literature and history at Birmingham
University, which included a year at Saloniki University in Greece.
After declining to enter the literary academic world I've been based
in Germany since around 1980. After working as a technical and literary
translator for many years I'm now moving more and more into help
authoring, which I find much more challenging and creative.
Background in Computers
This reads like the classic Geek's Tale. I've been obsessed with
these machines every since they appeared — both as a techie
and as a writer. The wonderful truth that dawned on me when I saw
my first computer was, "I'm never going to have to retype anything
ever again." And since then this has been extrapolated to all
the other kinds of data you can handle with a computer.
I bought and built the first Sinclair calculator kit as soon as
it came out, and since then I've been building and working with
PCs pretty much non-stop. The calculator was followed by the Sinclair
ZX-81, the Texas Instruments TI-99, then a monstrous "transportable"
CP/M machine with a huge 10MB hard disk (it looked like a garbage
can with a monitor built in), an Apricot with revolutionary 3.5"
floppy drives, an Atari ST and finally my first IBM-based PC. I
never got into Apples because I couldn't build them from self-bought
parts.
Programming? I dabbled in it for a while, even got pretty handy
in Turbo Pascal and BASIC, but it wasn't really my world. My level
is the user level; I feel much more at home in program design, letting
a really competent programmer implement my ideas and then working
with him or her to fine-tune the results to make them as usable
as possible.
Documentation and User Help
Documentation as always been a pet peeve of mine. I love simple,
straightforward writing that communicates clearly, and that's something
I often missed in the programs I used. My love of computers was
no fun without sharing it, and so I found myself helping friends
and associates to build their systems and get them up and running.
One thing led to another, and pretty soon the instructions I mailed
to friends turned into manuals and online help systems.
It helped that I seemed to have an instinctive ability for finding
problems in programs quickly — sometimes to the chagrin of
the programmers. If a program can be crashed I will generally crash
it soon after I start using it.
Testing, Debugging and Development
These activities have evolved out of the help authoring work. Just
as a translator by nature notices failings in a text more than anyone
else, a help author is also uniquely positioned to see clearly a
program's problem areas and potential avenues for improvement. In
time, questions and feedback sessions with the programmers turned
into a fruitful collaboration — now we work together on fine-tuning
the final versions of the programs and making them as usable as
possible.
Operating Systems
Through a combination of chance and choice I'm now pretty much
rooted in the Windows world, having migrated there from CP/M and
DOS. I played with Linux quite seriously for around a year but wasn't
really happy with it because at that time it demanded much too much
maintenance at the operating system level and didn't provide any
applications that delivered better performance for any of the things
I really wanted to do.
Over the last few months I have now installed Linux again and have
started using it seriously for a number of things — for example
I have Apache, MySQL and PHP installed and I use it as a test bed
for upgrades and modifications to my forum software before committing
them online. I haven't switched my mail server to it yet but I probably
will eventually.
If I had a second life in a parallel universe I'd probably start
playing with an Apple too, but you have to draw the line somewhere...
Other Interests and Activities
I almost became a professional photographer. I still do some freelancing
on the side, mainly people, portraits and a little reportage. When
I find the time I'm finally going to put together some of my work
on another website.
As an adjunct to being a photographer I'm also a total film buff
and am currently getting into video shooting and editing in a small
way. I probably shouldn't get into that here though because as soon
as I start talking movies I never stop...
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