Well, this is my first post to my first blog, so Hi and thanks for finding me :)
I suppose a quick introduction might be the place to start. I was born way back in 1979 in Yeovil in Somerset - thats in the South-East of the UK. As a child I moved from Yeovil to Rugby, then to Solihull where I went to St Alphege Junior and Primary school, and Tudor Grange Secondary School for two years, before moving to Hethersett near Norwich where I finished my GCSEs at Hethersett High School.
Once I had left High School we returned to Solihull where I studied for my A-Levels at Solihull Sixth Form College for another two years, before heading back to Norwich where I attended the University of East Anglia for the first year of a Degree in Electronic Engineering with Computing.
Unfortunately, I didn't handle my money very well back then, and ran out. Coupled with poor performance in my exams I decided to leave University and join the job market.
I started in the Typing Pool at Norwich Union in the summer of 1999, where I continued to work until April of 2000. Then I moved to Williams Refrigeration where I was working as IT Support, and moved the company from fairly humble beginnings in computing terms to a much more structured network and server infrastructure (albeit on a low budget, so things often fell a little short of my hopes and expectations!).
At the end of 2005, following a falling out with Williams over my pay and conditions, I decided to move on and came to work for my present employer Freebridge Community Housing. At the time I was employed by the Borough Council of Kings Lynn and West Norfolk, as Freebridge was not yet a legal entity.
Stock Transfer happened in April 2006, at which time Freebridge came to being and I took responsibility for the two servers I had configured fresh to host and control our data and the three we inherited from the Council.
As of now we run over 25 servers, and have in excess of 50 times the storage that we had back then. In the mean time, I have also attained MCSE certification from Microsoft in managing the network, and have become a full member of the British Computing Society. I also now have responsibility for the ICT Service Desk and Tobie and Andy who man it, and I am the organisation's Data Protection Officer.
In my personal life, I have been living with Ness my Fiancee since 2004, we have a son Josh who is 3 and a daughter Ellie who is 1. Ness's father passed away on Monday of this week, and as a family we are deeply saddened and will all miss him greatly. I expect I will blog about this more over the coming weeks as we work through our grief.
Well, thats my life so far in a nut-shell (of course there's lots missing - I am not quite ready to write an autobiography yet!) all thats left to say is Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Jim.
