Hello, my name is Chris Browne, and this is my weblog.
I've had a few people recently ask what my email address is, and the short answer is its in the middle of being changed, so until I've figured it all out you can use the following form to get in touch with me.
Go on, send me some nice words.
This is an online journal of some of the things that are going on in my life whilst living in Melbourne, Australia with my girlfriend, Rachel.
We relocated to Australia from England in April 2005 and spent the first few months with Rachel's parents in Western Australia and travelling about a bit while we were there. The place is fantastic, put it on your list of places you must go to, just check out the photos to see what I mean.
I've been working in the software development field since graduating from University in 1999, and always had an interest in computers ever since we got our Commodore 64 back in the 80's. That was a long time ago. Years later I started my degree in Computer Aided Chemistry at Surrey University in Guildford.
I spent my industrial year from University living in a small German village called Waldbronn, just out side of Karlsruhe, working for Hewlett-Packard in their analytical division developing software for the UV-Vis range of spectrometers. That was a good year, Germany is great, and I met a lot of good friends whilst I was there.
I got a job in software development straight after graduation as an automation engineer working on a software product that could automate a wide range of chemical equipment and analytical instruments, including production-level grade robotic arms.
I was working there until the move to Australia this year. I had been looking for a change for some time, and when Rachel's visa expired and she had to go back home to Australia, it was the perfect opportunity.
I'm now focusing every waking moment I have during the week to further my knowledge in software development and I'm in the process of studying for my MCAD. When I'm qualified its back to work.
I cherish this time I have to myself, I've not ever experienced anything like this before. In my university days I never really the passion to learn like I have now, and when I was at work I never had the time to keep up with the IT industry. In my spare time I was always out, London was only a few minutes away and all my good friends were up there, not to mention the good parties. So needless to say not much IT learning got done then.
This is a very exciting time for me, I've just moved to a new city, I'm taking the time out from working to further my education and get the qualifications that I've wanted to get for years but never had the chance to. I'm reading everything I can get my hands on, and in the last few months have read more books than I have since Uni.
I'm really enjoying this. For the first time I can remember I'm excited about learning new things and enjoy getting up in the morning to study. If only I was like this at Uni, I'm sure things would of been a lot different.
I've developed this interest in astrophysics since getting here in April. When I was over in WA I read a book on the search for the origins of atoms, then a book on quantum physics. I think my newfound interest has a lot to do with the natural beauty of Australia, and the stars...oh, the stars. I do wonder what I would be doing now if I were this interested in hard-core science back when I had the professors around me to teach me. I think in my next life I'd like a research job. But for now, Visual Basic.Net will do me just fine.
Chris.
I've had a few different domains over the past 6-7 years, with this being the result of everything I've learned on the way.
This, as all the other sites I've had, exists to share my experiences and thoughts with my family and friends. And this is more important now that ever as I'm about as far away as I can get from home, living in Melbourne and all that.
I first started out playing around with web sites in 1997, whilst on my industrial year at Uni. I was working in Germany, and having a web site to upload some pictures of the things I was doing, mainly the skiing actually, was a real bonus. It was all developed in Notepad and hosted on the Unix servers in the 10mb space you got as part of your Uni account. I'm completely self-taught when it comes to html, I started to pull apart web pages to try and understand how they worked and hacked around with them until things started working. Eventually it did.
The interest in web sites kind of died down when I got back to Uni for my final year. There were more important things to worry about, Friday nights at the Union, Wednesdays nights at Bo's etc. etc. And all family and friends were just around the corner, so there wasn't really any need to have the photo sharing ability anymore. Plus there were no digital cameras around then, so if you wanted to upload photos, you had to get them scanned. And who would bother doing that?
When I graduated I started hitting London more and more, meeting all my mates, and hanging out at clubs and parties. I was taking loads of photos all the time, still on 35mm film, but you could have the photos developed onto CD when you got them processed, and so a web site to host all the photos on came back into existence.
Not a lot on the face of it has changed actually, its still a website to upload all the photos to. Its just done in a much more slicker fashion these days, although it could be argued that it doesn’t show all that much.
Its completely developed in ASP, written with validated XHTML 1.1 and CSS, check the links at the bottom if you don’t believe me. I've developed all the scripts that run the site myself, all written in VBScript, pulling all the data from a MySQL database.
Oh yeah, if you’re a Windows user, you might want to turn on the ClearType option in the Display Properties dialog. It’s under the Appearance tab, click on Effects... and you'll see it. Things look a lot better now right? I believe if you a Mac user this is the default setting, although I've never touched a Mac in my life so wouldn't have a clue.
Enjoy, I do.