Stoat - Where?

What’s your name and where do you come from?

Ignoring the Blind Date style question, I’m Jamie Talbot and I’m from the Wirral. If you’re not from England (and maybe even if you are) the nearest place you’ll probably have heard of is Liverpool, which is about 20 minutes away. I’m just about to turn 25 and am currently travelling around Australia after living and working in Japan as an English teacher for a company called Nova for 2 years. And before you ask, no I’m not a renowned jazz alto saxophonist. That’s another Jamie Talbot.

Ah, so you’re a teacher then?

Um, well not exactly… I actually graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester in 2002. Having done an MSc in the same field in 2003, I was presented with a number of options. Firstly, a PhD in Computing that would inevitibly lead to a lifetime of academia, which while a noble pursuit is not something I think I could cope with longterm. 15 years non-stop education was about as much as I could take.

The second option was to go straight into the career I want to pursue, computer game programming. The problem with this option was that I’d be tied down to a job, a house and mortgage and at age 22 that seemed pretty scary. It was also dependent on employers actually wanting me, which given the fickle and oftentimes fragile nature of the game industry was by no means guaranteed.

The third option; take some time out and go travelling around the world. This was my favourite choice, as I’d been in education none stop for 15 years, with only a couple of months off to see a bit of America. It was a plan marred only by the fact that I had no money. In fact, I had less than no money, having accrued a spectacular overdraft, credit card bill and student loan triple combo. No bank in their right mind would give me any more credit, so I thought I was limited to England.

Anyway, to cut a long story short (too late?), I randomly applied online for a job teaching English in Japan, and was surprised a couple of months later to find I’d been accepted. The only qualification was that I had to be a native speaker of English. While some people may argue that plastic scouse isn’t technically English per se, thankfully the interviewers didn’t agree. A few months later and there I was. Fast forward two years and I was off again, this time to Australia, where I’m visiting friends and picking up contract IT work here and there. The weather’s great and the people are friendly. And I can eat cheese again. As my former employers would say, I’m Loving It.

So, why a website then?

Well, it’s the thing to do nowadays, isn’t it? You’re nobody unless you have a place to show how important you are. It’s my equivalent of a yacht, or seeing as I still can’t drive, a BMW. Besides, I get to look up my name on the Internet and find me, which helps my ego. Also, I’m pretty bad at keeping in touch with people and living in another country isn’t going to help any. Setting up a blog allows me to let everyone know how I’m getting on, without having to type a million emails. Yes, lazy.

Finally, I never had a Geocities or Tripod site, so I feel like I missed out on that part of web history. Then again, that’s not necessarily something to be ashamed of; Geocities is pretty much the 80’s of the web, with its bright colours, hideous animated gifs and men-at-work under construction pictures. See here for what I could have won…

But… It looks a bit crap.

Ah, yes well. I’m not a web designer in any sense. I dropped Art at school as soon as I could. I can’t paint, I can’t draw and so there’s no reason why I should be able to design good looking webpages. I can recognise a good layout and colour scheme when I see one, but damned if I can produce one myself. The parts of this site that look ok or work well were inspired (though written myself) from well-designed sites such as Clagnut.com. The parts that are rubbish are almost certainly my own masterpieces of design.

Behind the scenes, on the other hand, is another matter. While I’m using Wordpress for the blog, the rest of the site is created by my own fair hand using PHP and MySQL. I’ve also written a couple of plugins for WordPress which quite a few people have found useful. The project occupying most of my free time at the moment is Gengo, which adds multilingual capabilities to WordPress.

Why is this ‘not a colophon’?

Mainly because I don’t know what it means. Besides, I don’t think I’m trendy enough to use the word; having a blog and gallery is almost too much in itself. ‘About Me’ will do just fine for now, but maybe I’ll change it in a few years.

Jeez, you talk a lot don’t you?

Yeah, verbosity is one of my better known (and most loved, I’m sure) character traits. But to be fair, I did warn you not to bother!