Who am I?
Well, I'm a chartered physicist, with a PhD in physics from the University of Warwick. I am married to Ros and have two young daughters called Jessica and Eleanor. We live in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, a town about 10 miles from Coventry and about 15 miles from Birmingham. That's in Britain.My day job is Senior Web Developer at the University of Warwick. Since 1996, I have run a spare-time design consultancy, Pinxit Design, offering music typesetting, graphic design, copywriting and editing for both print and web media. I was consultant designer for the Music Centre at Warwick from 1995-2004, and worked for over 10 years as design manager at Warwick Business School. I do stuff in ColdFusion/Railo as well as Adobe Creative Suite. I've got a Level 3 Certificate in Specialist Photography & Presentation. Things that interest me include photography, typography, and the psychology of design.
Whither Kaijaks?
Excellent question, I'm glad you asked. Kaijaks is a Latvian name (and hence the j is silent), which is inherited from my grandparents who fled Riga, the capital of Latvia following its invasion by the Soviet Union in World War II. I was born and bred in London, and my first language is definitely English (and RP at that). However, I understand spoken Latvian reasonably well, having had it spoken around the house in my early years. However, my written Latvian is only informal, and probably not very grammatical. If you write to me, I much prefer English - I'm perfectly fluent in that ;-)Anyway, if you want to know more about Latvia and Latvians, I recommend Latvians Online. Of course none of this offers explanation for my fanatical support for Welsh rugby. You'll have to get in touch with me if you're that interested in the reasons for that...
Nostalgia
This is the seventh significant generation of my website since I first created a public_html directory, back in 1993/4. It's really just a hack together to avoid looking embarrassingly out-of-date. Anyway, for nostalgia's sake, here's a link to the original Cap'n Fishy photo of me that appeared on that first site. To put things in perspective, this was a 256 colour GIF scanned with a three-pass hand scanner, in the days before JPEGs existed(!), when Mosaic was hot, and when most people thought the 'net was something you caught fish in... indeed, those were the days of Spatula City.
Under the carpet
The web is all so this week nowadays, but I want to save a couple of pointers for old time's sake. I guess they say something about where I come from.These days, my fave TV is probably House, but back in the day, Buffy slayed. I guess I can watch it all on my TiVo. I used to do loads of singing—mostly choral and musicals. I was in the gold medal-winning University Chamber Choir and was Secretary, President, and original website designer for the University Gilbert & Sullivan Society.
I'm a confirmed Apple user now, but I was an advocate for many years of RISC OS, as they were always such usable and productive machines. I use a virtual one now. I dabble with Windows and linux too. I used to write code in Delphi, and Fortran and BASIC before that. IT history includes delights like DOS, real UNIX and VAX/VMS. I first used the Internet in 1991 and my first website was built sometime in 1993/4.
I was an author on computer-based design and publishing. For some years I was a regular contributing author for Acorn Publisher magazine (ISSN 1356-1537), also featuring in Foundation Risc User CD magazine.
I also like F1, wine, and penguins.