Dave Whiteland
Just the facts.
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- Beholder
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I write, draw, and program the Beholder projects.
Current project:
The Knot-Shop Man, a set of four books for smart children or thoughtful adults, was published on 09/09/09 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Planetarium.
- mySociety
- These days I work full-time for the remarkable people who are mySociety.
- Exploding Pen
- I keep Exploding Pen ticking over, which publishes the Beholder book projects Fudebakudo and The Knot-Shop Man.
- $_ means it, @_ means them
- I'm a Computer Scientist by training — I studied and later taught at the Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway.
- I work as a programmer (although these new-fangled days the industry term is "developer"), most recently working with Ruby on Rails. I tend to think in Perl for comfort-coding (not least because it seems to me there is something slightly backward about being forced to express yourself in a language doesn't have pronouns), but the fact is I have probably spent far more time working in Java, together with a fair bit of Javascript. I do estoric code too: the Fudebakudo helmet was, for the challenge of it, crafted entirely in POV-Ray using a text editor (yes: no wireframe modeller used for that!). Going back in time, my first full-time job was on the early HOLMES system used in Police incident rooms, and before that I wrote Assembly code for a summer job. I did my algorithms coursework in ALGOL68 (on a VAX), and way before that I was coding BASIC on a 8+32Kb UK101 in a case made of wood.
- Aikido
- Not brawling for no prizes. In skirts. Weird.
- Renbukan dojo, Bangkok
- Spelthorne dojo, Staines
- Suibhneas dojo, North London
- Airenjuku dojo, Central London
I've spent around six years, on and off, in Thailand. For two and a half of those years I was a volunteer at a girls' school, where I taught art to 6-year-olds, and English to 11-year-olds.
I'm an ex-biker, and I miss it. Many, many years ago I had a trusty CX500. More recently, I was riding a Honda NT650DV. If you don't know about bikes, you'll think: ooh, big bike. If you know the difference between an NT and a CBR, you'll think: Dullville.
I sometimes crew a type of sailing boat called a Drascombe. Two masts, tan sails (you care? OK: a gunter-rigged yawl with a loose-footed main) and the whole thing the size of a very large wardrobe.
For not entirely practical reasons, I'm a member of the IGKT:
I consume the following things regularly:
- TED talks
- Almost all TED talks are interesting, but the best ones are astounding
- Private Eye
- The celebrated satirical magazine, featuring some of Britains's best cartoonists
- Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics
- The pictures never change. After a while, you don't even notice.
- Neil Gaiman's Journal
- Mr Gaiman generously lets his readers know what he's up to. And what he's up to is more often than not something cool and/or interesting.
- Randi's commentary at the JREF
- Updates from Randi's ongoing work to hold back the tide of pseudo-science, flim-flam, and the so-called paranormal
- Gruts
- A fine example of blogging: personal, silly, clever, funny
- The Straight Dope
- "Fighting ignorance since 1973 (it's taking longer than we thought)"
Three worthy causes to which I belong:
There are a number of people whom I greatly admire, and luckily for me several of them are my friends and teachers.
Finally, in a list of no particular order, here are some people whose lives or work are, to my mind, especially deserving of a standing ovation: