Welcome...
Welcome to my little space on the worldwide web. I first appeared here back in 1991! Where have you been? 😃
I think I'm a typical bloke in liking cars, gadgets and 'tech', and so you won't be surprised to learn that this website reflects some of that! I’m a child of the late 50s, born in Balham, (where?) south London. I’m married to Ann, and we moved to Kettering, Northamptonshire, in 1996 after many years of moving around the country for our day-jobs. (I think that's where I got my love of travel from!) The famous Myers-Briggs personality indicator tool reveals that I’m an ESFJ - an extroverted, sensing, feeling, judgemental person!
My life in and around 'tech'could be best described as a game of two halves three thirds!
First Third (Late 50s to the 80s)
I left school in the mid-70s clutching my certificates and working in what felt like a very analogue world. For the first 30 years, up to the mid-80s, there wasn't much tech at all, although my day-jobs from the mid-70s allowed me to work with one of the first cassette-based ordering systems as well as an office-based floppy-disk-driven word processor. Yummy! 😛 Salaries (as well as lapels and hair) were big! Certainly no internet, with only telephones at home for some people and pretty-much no remote controls for anything.
Second Third (90s, 00s & 10s)
Then, during the second third, covering the next thirty-years taking me into the mid-2010s, there was an explosion of innovation. Along came the world-wide-web, mobile phones, CDs, iPods and Satellite TV - all mixed in with a strong feeling that I wanted to work for myself! So I did! I also got married, and towards the end of my 'second third', after almost 25 years of self-employment, I retired! 😉. During that time, hair and lapels returned to a more manageable size, whilst the greedier got more greedy! 😯
Final Third (2020s and beyond...)
As I stumbled into my third (and final?) third, technology now played a big - and very normal - part of my (and most other people's everyday) lives. Pretty-much every home now had at least one PC, three mobile phones and a 'magic' speaker that you could use to play your favourite music and control other tech around the house. More importantly, that same device could settle arguments in quizzes or save you looking out the window to check the weather 🙄. But ironically, there were now more food-banks than ever, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Then, for the first time in my life, something happened that united the world and offered everyone an opportunity to reflect on who, and what, was really important to them. 🤔The Coronavirus arrived without invitation and plunged everyone into uncharted territory. In the end, technology played its part in helping to develop a vaccine in record time and take us all back to near-normality, but at a tremendous cost at all levels! 😱
Hope you enjoy looking round my site. Drop me a line with any feedback. 👍👎
Hope you enjoy looking round my site. Drop me a line with any feedback. 👍👎
Steve Palmer collage in black and white