About: I currently work for the Internet marketing agency MediaCo in their Dundee office, as an SEO Technical Manager - main focus on the more technical aspects of on-site search engine optimisation, although also covering other various data analysis and reporting roles. I studied at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, and have a BSc Hons in Computing, MSc in Computing: Information Engineering and spent time as an ad-hoc tutor and information retrieval research student.

Some of my favourite things:

  • "It never gets easier, you just go faster" - Greg LeMond (the greatest cyclist ever).
  • Spicy food.
  • The information retrieval task, and the ability of search engines to understand the complex concepts and semantics from unstructured data.
  • Cycling up hills; Pitroddie to Glendoick Loch has to be one of my local favourites - a little known road that climbs an unrelenting 500 feet over about a mile with some really good kicks!
  • Big data.
  • Shopping trips to All Saints (followed by Urban Outfitters).
  • Star Trek - if you were to put me on the spot and ask which one I would probably say The Next Generation, although the latest film is a spectacular reinvigoration of the franchise.
  • Cooking - latest menu (Sep 2012) is a Scottish feast: oatcakes with jam/cream cheese/pate, followed by veg soup, then salmon parcels, haggis stuffed chicken with a Drambuie cream sauce for mains, butterscotch bread pudding and some coffee with shortbread and tablet to round it of… still work in progress though!
  • Movies - Richard III (Ian McKellen), The Madness of King George, A Beautiful Mind, K19 The Widowmaker, The Crow, Master and Commander, to name a few!
  • Walks around the countryside, particular favourite is up by Laird's Loch.
  • Dundee Thistle Cycling Club.
  • "never in the history of information have so many depended on so few for so much - and been kept so utterly in the dark about what it is that they are actually getting (and, more to the point, not getting)" - Managing Gigabytes; Witten, Moffat & Bell. I'm not so sure that this is as true today as it was a decade ago, but certainly could be argued that it is.
  • Classical ballet (Giselle is probably a favourite, although also love Matthew Bourne's work).
  • Music - Type O Negative, HIM, Depeche Mode, Noah and the Whale, to name a few!
  • Sid Meier's Civilization - from the first version in the early 90's through to Civilization V Gods & Kings, each new version is the one thing that drives me to keep upgrading my PC!