I'm an Broadcast Engineer, working as a Playout and Automation Specialist for a company in the UK. Broadcast Automation is essentially creating a playlist, just like in iTunes, to control what is playing and more specifically, when, in a TV station. This doesn't just include the video - you have to automate subtitles (for people with hearing problems), audio descriptions (for people with sight problems), voice overs, the aspect ratio, and all of the ancillary data (that end users aren't even aware of, going on behing the scenes). Broadcast Playout, is actually doing all of the things that I just mentioned that we automate. Until recently, there was a seperate machine for each "job" in a TV station - something playing a program, something else adding subtitles etc etc. Recently "Channel in a Box" units have become more and more common - a single, small server, that can do all these jobs - saving everyone money. My job is installing, scripting for, maintaining and supporting both the Automation, and the Playout systems in TV stations across the world.

In my own time, I enjoy cycling (off road, as much as possible), walking (again, off road in the countryside) and messing around with computers, networks and electronics. This website is dedicated to the latter (as I'm not one of those people obsessed with sharing bikerides and walks for the world to see how far I went this weekend!).

I've always been interested in media, so lots of my projects are sound, video, web (etc) orientated, whether hardware or software. I'm also really into system administration, and all the new exciting technology that goes in hand with that. I run my own server with a handfull of virtual machines and containers for running websites, email based services, databases, firewalls, routers, chat servers to name a few. I enjoy coding and scripting and am at least familier with C, C#, Python, bash, PHP and HTML.

I run Linux on every computer I'm allowed to in the house, and my "desktop" workstation is actually a vitual machine on my server, with a physical GPU, mouse and keyboard passed to it so I can use it locally.

If any of that sounds exciting, you might find something interesting on this site. Let me know if you do, or you have any questions or comments.