About Me

Early Years

When I was five or six, I saw computers for the first time. My much older cousin went to the University of Sydney, and took me there to play on the card punch machines. No-one seemed to mind me being there, and each time I left with a box full of cards to play with at home. In those days computers still took up most of a room, and had lots of buttons, lights, and switches on them. I loved the blinking lights.

IBM-style computer punch card. It's about 19 centimetres across and stores 80 bytes of data. The 1.24 megabyte image of the card shown here would take over 16,000 of these cards to store.

Source: Wikipedia.

Computers

For much of my life, I've been heavily into computers, science, and sometimes other nerdy things like electronics.

In early primary school my grandfather took me to a computer show in Sydney that was run by Tandy Electronics. The highlight of the show was a session with a room full of desks, with TRS-80 computers set up on each desk. They talked everyone though writing a short computer program on the TRS-80 and then running it. That was the first time I even saw a computer program being written and then run in real time in real life, let alone wrote one and ran it myself.

You can try for yourself an almost identical program here, on an emulated TRS-80, on this website.

After attending the TRS-80 show I wanted a computer more than anything else in the world except for a girlfriend. Like the stereotypical computer nerd, I was terrible at sport and very shy with girls.

Also when I was about ten, Gramp lent me a book about how semiconductor electronics worked (like diodes and transistors). It was an adult book that went into subatomic physics (atoms, orbitals, free electrons, holes, etc.), at approximately the level of the current NSW Year 12 HSC Physics course. He'd read the book but, although electronics had been his hobby and passion for many years, he didn't understand much of it. So he lent it to me in the hope that I'd understand it, and at a deep enough level that I could explain it to him. Which I did.

After that I moved on to another book in the same series, about how microprocessors work.

Around year four or five I was given an astronomy book, and got really interested in it. We bought a small second-hand telescope from a man named Ken Beames, and ended up becoming good friends with him. He was in his eighties and had done some amazing things. Including building his own observatory, complete with large telescope and dome. And a full-size Grandfather clock, and person-sized planetarium projector, both made out of solid brass.

The telescope at Linden Observatory built by Ken Beames. Ken was a key figure in my early interest in astronomy. I took this photo a couple of years ago at an open day.

By year seven I was spending most of my spare time learning how to program computers. Even though I didn't have one until the end of the year — for Christmas we got our first "family" computer, a Commodore VIC-20 (which was really bought for me).

Almost immediately after that, in January, Dad was diagnosed with terminal spinal cancer. They gave Dad three months to live, but he lasted eight. Immediately after Dad died, we spent a few nights in the A-frame house on Ken Beames' property near Ken's main house, mainly to give Mum a break from the aloneness of our house.

In the same month that Dad died, Omega Science Digest, my favourite magazine, ran an article entitled "Whizz Kids Striking It Rich in Software". I seemed to really take that message to heart. Perhaps because it was the last thing I was into while I still had a father. It gave me a feeling of hope, and a point of focus to carry on my life with after Dad was gone.

Taken around the time my father died, this is the only photo of me (on the right) with Ken Beames. You can also see the observatory he built at Linden. My father had been heavily into DIY — but Ken took it to a whole other level.

In the year 1984 I read the book "1984" for school, and spent most of the year writing computer programs in my spare time.

My grandfather moved into the granny flat under our house, which was part of the extensions Dad had done. He sold his house to another of his grandchildren, my cousin Dr Stuart Kidd. Gramp was very keen for me to become a radio ham. He died of a heart attack about a year after moving into our house. His will said that said no-one could withdraw any of the capital from his estate until fifteen years later — except for an amount of $600 that was left specifically for me to buy an amateur radio set.

Around age 15 or 16 I learned Morse code and got my amateur (a.k.a. "ham") radio licence. But (even with being keen to honour my grandfather's memory) I was too shy to talk to anyone much on air.

Guitar

I started guitar lessons in September of year nine, a year after my father died almost to the day. The lessons went for several months, and after that I was self-taught.

For my year ten electronics project, I made a guitar amplifier from Dick Smith Electronics kits. When my English teacher saw it, he refused to believe that I made the cabinet for it by myself at home. I was mostly known as a computer nerd — and by then, increasingly as a guitar player and as somewhat of a comedian. Never as a carpenter, sheet metal worker or upholsterer. When I insisted that I'd built the cabinet myself, he skeptically pointed out the round contoured edges under the vinyl covering, and which "looked like they were made in a factory", and asked how I made them. I answered, "With a rasp". I'm not sure how convinced he was. Which isn't really that surprising, since he had no idea that I grew up watching (and sometimes participating in) much of my house being built from scratch using very basic tools.

By age 15-16, I had a plan to become rich by building guitar amplifiers "just like Mesa Boogie". I built and sold a guitar amplifier for a teacher from school who had a reputation as a hippie. One time he walked into one of my classes (he wasn't one of my own teachers) and, in front of everyone, gave me a few hundred dollars in cash, asking me "Have you got the gear yet?" I knew that he meant had I got the gear to build the amplifier with. I'm not sure if everyone else knew what he meant.

University

I won many academic awards while studying Physics at Macquarie University in Sydney. Occasionally they would take me aside and show me things like, "This is the scatter plot of students from [a physics subject I'd completed]. These are most of the students [a big clump of dots near the middle of the page]. These are all the other A-grades [a thin line of dots extending above the big clump]... And this is you [a large gap of white space, and then one dot right at the top]."

I wasn't a very confident young adult — so I think they were trying to encourage me, and help me with my confidence, and convince me that I should keep studying Physics.

I was the second person ever to win the University Medal for Physics at Macquarie Uni. They explained to me that at most other universities, e.g. the University of Sydney, to win their medal "almost all you have to do is top the year — but at Macquarie the medal really means something".

My PhD project (which I left after several months to work in IT) was mostly writing code for data modelling and visualisations in C and MATLAB.

My two minutes of fame — Front page news when I left my PhD in Astronomy.

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