About

The Monsters of Zao, where the world turns black and white.

Hello. This is my blog. Thanks for visiting.

Is it raining outside? I’d probably get on the motorbike anyway.

Snowing? Let me get the board.

OK, since this should be an ‘about’ page, here we go:

“Born and raised near the sunny holiday destination* of Grimsby on the north coast of England. I left to pursue a life of accidentally being in nice places and meeting good people whilst earning money through various forms of engineering. At one point I was teaching English. Pity those students.

For a long time now I’ve been based in Japan for reasons I can’t remember and I spend as much time as I can on family, motorcycling, snowboarding, writing, photography or otherwise being outside. Most things can often be done outside if needs be.

Otherwise I’ll be indoors tinkering with technology.”

Me

As for this site, it’s been going since February 2003 across various publishing platforms though it’s now been self-hosted and using WordPress for a long time. Before this I had an old school hand crafted ‘home page‘ which I nurtured from 1996 to 2008 before putting it out to pasture and then somewhat resurrecting it for more technical and indoor activities in 2014 and which is currently built in Jekyll

As time passes, I mark more of the older posts here as private to help keep the web less cluttered. Most early posts were somewhat throwaway from wherever I was, such as on mountains, at music festivals, in bars etc. etc..

Little Known Facts

  1. I’ve finished NaNoWriMo twice, first in 2011 and again in 2014. It’s unclear if I’ll ever do it again.
  2. The phrase ‘nani kore’ means ‘what’s this?’, and its something I still say a lot apparently.


* There’s a good chance I couldn’t defend this statement in court.