Starting a blog.

Well it's happened. About 5 years after everyone else seems to have given up on blogs, I've decided it's time I got one. As this is my first post, I suppose I better start with a little about me.

I live in the north of England, in a small market town called Chorley, in the centre of Lancashire. Having lived here all my life, I find it difficult to imagine living anywhere else. The weathers crap, the town has seen better days, and some of the 'locals' could probably do with locking up, but it's home and I have a lot of family and friends in the area. Saying that though, if someone offered me a job in california, or tokyo I'd probably be out of here faster than Usain Bolt. :)

Since leaving college in '95 I've spent most of the last 15 years working in a number of companies doing mainly software development jobs. In these companies I've had various roles from junior developer, up to Head of Software Development and in this time I've learned to program in more languages than I care to remember. My career has always been pretty important in my life, as (being a true geek) I've always known I wanted to be a computer programmer since I got bought a Sinclair ZX81 for christmas when I was 10.

In the last 12 months though my life has taken a huge turn. Since been diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis last summer, I've had to re-evaluate a number of things in my life. I've had to stop working at the moment, and as the focus of my life has now become getting this condition under control the career has had to take a back seat for a while. I am still trying to keep myself in the game, and try to keep abreast of new technologies etc. but the health situation is ruling the roost at the moment.

On that subject, please if you have never heard of RA, and want to know more, then visit the brilliant Rheumatoid Arthritis Guy blog and check out his 60 second guide to RA. Also if you can take the time, please share this info with as many people as you can. RA is a terrible disease, that is not very well understood and the more people who are made aware of what it is, and how it affects sufferers the better.

As for this blog, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to post up on here, and how often, but I guess it will be the usual mix of rants about politics, computers, technology, the state of the uk and my medical condition that I seem to spend most of my time blathering about to anyone who will listen.

Hopefully there are some more people out there in cyberspace who'll listen to my crap, even if they don't really pay any attention to it....

Swin.