|
|
|
Me & My Career
|
 My name is Matthew, I am 31 and live in Bedfordshire,
England. I work for West Herts Hospitals NHS Trust as a Technical Support Officer.
After leaving school, I worked for Marks & Spencer for five years in various roles. This was around
the time that it started making the serious cutbacks and badly flawed management decisions that led to its eventual losses. For me, it simply confirmed what I already knew, that I
didn't want to pursue a career in retail. I started taking evening classes in electronics, completing City and Guilds 224 Electronics Servicing both in TV/Radio Reception and
Control Systems Technology.
Shortly after beginning the course, I went to work for ND ServiceTeam which became Norsk Data Ltd then Nextra UK and now Telenor Business Solutions (identity crisis, anyone?) I joined them as a trainee and they kindly paid my college fees. I stayed
there for five years, working on prestigious contracts and with some very good engineers. As much as I enjoyed working there, the time came to move on as I wanted to get far more
involved in software support and in my final year I was working on a purely hardware contract with little scope for training or improvement.
In April 2002, I joined my present employer as a Technical Support Officer, I don't like the title but I do enjoy the job. The work is varied and
interesting and, unlike many departments, we get to see the whole of the hospital and work with lots of different people. As well as providing software and hardware support to the
Trust's computer users I get involved in equipment installations, system administration and configuration.
For full details of my qualifications and experience, please read my CV.
|
|
Me & Computers
|
|
I have always enjoyed computers and computing; I am, by nature, something of a geek and proudly so. A colleague made the picture of me in a propeller
hat but, for the record, I don't actually own one. I would also like to take this opportunity to point out I have neither a beard nor sandles.
|
|
|
I am still a keen Amiga user, the whole of this site was developed using Amiga software, albeit running under emulation on my PC. I remain unconvinced that the new hardware and software are going - even long term - to have the same effect they once did on the world of home computing. It would be nice to be proved wrong.
I'm not anti-Microsoft, I like to use whatever I consider best for the job. That may mean a package under Windows, AmigaOS, or Linux. That's a damn inconvenience for the user (me), but until someone gets everything right on one platform I'll keep switching.
|
|
Me & Music
|
|
I love music, I had piano lessons when I was in junior school but gave them up to learn euphonium (I got grade two). I continued with neither although
we still have a piano at home which I like to play as often as I can. For the last year or so I have been having guitar lessons. This is an instrument I really want to
master.
I like most styles of music and the best thing is discovering little known artists and seeing them in small smokey clubs where they'll come out and
sign your CDs afterwards. I hope you'll explore some of the links on this site and discover someone you like too. I think the Internet is great for spreading music and introducing
people to artists they would never of heard of otherwise. I owe many of my discoveries to NanciNet, the mailing list for Nanci Griffith fans. As great as free music is though, I firmly believe that once you've discovered someone, you should
support them. Buy, don't copy, the albums. Go to the gigs. Set up web pages. Tell your friends. Sing the songs.
|
|
Me & The Open University
|
|
In 2001 I started with the Open University, it's a great way to learn. I enjoy learning but have never been the
studenty type and have never regretted not going to a conventional university straight from school. I have completed two courses, MU120 Open Mathematics and T173 Engineering the Future. They are both level one courses which introduce you to both the subject and the OU way
of studying. This year I am taking M206 Computing - An Object-Oriented Approach. It's about object technology and network computing.
Programming is never an area of computers that I've never really experimented with in depth. I hope M206 will change that.
|
|
|
