(def newblog)

Saturday, Jun 25, 2011 · 600 words · approx 3 mins to read

I finally decommissioned the server that hosted the old pixeltards blog, and while it eventually just degenerated into a set of random pictures after I deleted the blog content, a fresh and clean new server gave me the impetus to have another go.

Quite a lot has happened since the last time I said random stuff about my life on the Internets. I broke up with a long term girlfriend, left the city I’d moved to to be with her, got a shiny new job in a tiny little village near London, and I’ve been settled here for the last 18 months since that all happened.

The new job is at Imagination Technologies, where I have the self-imposed title of Competitive and Performance Analysis Engineer. I started out in Developer Technology with the idea that I’d do about half devtech and half competitive analysis. That turned out to be not what the company needed, so along with a colleague I left devtech and started a new dedicated competitive analysis group inside of PowerVR, the graphicsy bit of Imagination.

Now we do full-time C&PA, helping the PowerVR group stay on top of its game by understanding in-depth not only our own stuff, but the competition’s too. We spread that knowledge out inside the company so everyone’s well informed, with a focus on making sure the right data gets to the customers of our technology in the right form, so they select the right cores and make the right chip-level decisions when they specify their products. We also arm the sales and marketing teams with what they need to get our products out there and make them look great under high- and low-level scrutiny.

If you’ve ever picked up and used an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch then you’ve used PowerVR technology, and we have myriad other customers as well as Apple that are using our tech in some pretty amazing products. Literally hundreds of millions of devices out there have some form of PowerVR technology inside, usually making pixels look amazing on screens you hold in your hand.

Outside of work I have an amazing girlfriend who could do way better than me, I love living in Kings Langley, and I still love pretending that I’m a good programmer, despite not doing as much for a living as I thought I would be doing when I joined the company.

I still hack righteous lisp, usually Clojure, and quite a bit of Objective-C while I try and come up with that killer iOS app that’ll let me buy a big chunk of Imagination and retire when I’m 50.

If you’re interested, I’m on Twitter and I have some pictures of my life up on Flickr. I’m still actively involved with Beyond3D, where I’ve stepped down as Editor to let a very good friend of mine, Alex, take the helm and see the site into its next stage of evolution.

Christine and I have an amazing little kitten called Molly, who I’ll probably blog about a lot. She’s a source of epic joy and epic frustration in almost equal quantities at the moment, as she grows up. Parenting is hard.

That’s about it really. I play Minecraft when I can, I read loads on my Kindle (buy me books on my wishlist please!), and I generally try and add my little bit to the world wherever possible.

Oh, and just because I can, I wrote bits of the blog software myself, forking jekyll and hacking it up a bit to do what I want, publishing via git.

Hello, World (again).