Childhood had its ups and downs. By the age of seven I had undergone eye surgery and ear surgery and was convinced that unlike my friends, I was made from spare parts which didn't fit together very well. I imagine I was spoilt to some extent although I can't really remember much. My earliest memory has me unscrewing the wooden rungs of my cot and falling onto the floor of my parents bedroom. I would crawl out of the room to the stairs. It was a huge point of fear and trepidation. Nevertheless, I had to descend it for some reason. Quite how to do so was another issue. After a long time I figured out that going down backwards on my stomach was the solution. I have vivid recollections of the smell from the carpet and how incredibly clammy my hands would get. I was a curiously determined infant.

After that memory and a few others there are lots of big gaps punctuated by lots of drawing, playing with toy cars and riding bikes. Your average middle class boyhood then.

I attended a couple of schools in Dublin but outside of art class, seldom enjoyed the educational process in any of them. I did enjoy the friendships I formed and maintain many of them to this day.

My teenage years were quite uneventful. I enjoyed cycling and under my brothers influence spent a lot of time customizing my roadbike. I played rugby well at first - and then poorly as I remained small and others grew. Additionally, I played (field) hockey, tennis and cricket in a very Anglicised school in Dublin. I wanted to play soccer and asked the rugby coach could we set up soccer posts on the rugby pitch. This led to a bit of a cooling off period between me and some teachers. I think I gave it up rugby because I was a small kid and was fed up being pounded by larger kids. I gave up hockey 'cos I hated it. I scored an own goal in a big game when I was about fourteen so that sort of sealed my fate in hockey-lore. I'm still quite proud of that. I can't even recall why I stopped cricket, presumably I was crap or something. So, outside of these sports, I devoted my free time to cycling and a small debating team. When I reached the zenith of my socialist disorder, I used my finely honed argumentative skills to write a letter to the leaders of my school to complain about the class based system of separation which is introduced within schools as soon as you promote some students to prefecture. Later I learned that many of the teachers agreed with me and loved my letter. In the end, this back fired on me when the headmaster made me do prefect duties without any prefect privileges. I found this absurd but funny. He should have been in politics and to some extent I suppose he was as the head of a school.

In hindsight, I should have taken up the guitar, trained in kung fu and joined a soccer club but money wasn't exactly growing on trees. During my teens, I knew I wanted to create and design. I was unaware of how to pursue this and so it seems were the schools career guidance people. Back then, (in the Irish educational system) when you were about fifteen you had to make pretty considerable decisions concerning your future academic pursuits. Most teens pursued business, sciences or history. I was good at business stuff but hated it and had a hard time giving it up as a teacher felt I could achieve a high grade in the final. To cut a long and dull story short, I pursued Maths and Science when I should have pursued Art - which I was always pretty good at. I hated Chemistry but loved Physics and Applied Maths. In any event, my University endeavors saw me take Engineering over the far more interesting Physics. I figured it would give me more options. I was right. In school I was originally aiming for Medicine. I'm glad I didn't pursue that. Having worked in health care, I've seen the bureacracy doctors have to contend with. My father died suddenly two weeks before I took my final school exams so it was a difficult time and academically I didn't really do my self justice. It must have been an incredibly stressful period as I still occasionally have a nightmare in which I am about to take my Chemistry final but have done no preparation for it. Such was the case.

Engineering at Trinity was quite theoretical, so much so in fact, its graduates end up being awarded a BA in Math in addition to their Engineering degrees. I clearly recall sitting in one of my first Math lectures on Gauss-Jordan elimination. I laughed thinking the lecturer was joking in this dullness only to gaze around at about 250 students all furiously writing down what the man with two brains was saying. I loathed it but had no idea what I wanted to do, so I stuck it out. Around this time, I purchased and rode a motorcycle around Dublin - a practice which helped re-invent my outlook on life for the better. When I graduated fromn Trinity there were no jobs in Dublin, Ireland..anywhere..it was 1992. Some companies were hiring new graduates in what was referred to as the 'milk-round'. Graduates who played university rugby and whose father knew somebody had a small chance of gaining work. That didn't include me so I knew I had to get out of Ireland and try my luck elsewhere.

I decided to place myself somewhere where I knew no one and very little about their culture. I suppose I wanted an adventure. At first, that meant Germany but then I thought, why not another continent? So Australia became target one and then Canada. Owing to the weak global economy nobody was interested in issuing me a Visa. Presumably I could become another social welfare statistic, so it was understandable.

In total, I lived in Dublin for twenty three years before emigrating to the US. I was fortunate to be awarded an American Green Card in a lottery based system called the Morrison Visas (I think). I left for America and had no idea what to expect. After a brief stay in Boston with no job opportunities, I moved to Silicon Valley in search of work as an engineer. I had majored in digital signal processing (DSP) and telecommunications so while I was nicely qualified to work for DSP companies they required Security Clearance which I couldn't get as a Green card holder. Ouch! Didn't anticipate that. I started out working for a company then called SunDisk and now known as SanDisk having fallen afoul of Sun Microsystems legal team. I used to analyze and fix customer returned faulty PCMCIA memory cards. It was boring but good work and I am very grateful to my Irish friend and my Scottish boss for the start they gave me in the US job market.

Next I worked for an outfit in Redwood city called Telegen. The less said about that place the better - but there were some nice folk there.

I worked for Applied Materials for about four years before quitting as I wanted to learn web design and was tired of doing IS&T exclusively.

So, I began to teach myself HTML and JavaScript and wrestle with the jungle of disparate browser rendering engines that thwarted every designers efforts.

Around this time I discovered a martial art called Aikido. It was a life changing epiphany for me and I practice it regularly to this day under Nadeau Sensei who trained with the founder, O Sensei (Morihei Ueshiba) in Japan.

My next job saw me enter the dot-com bust (as a web designer) for a few years before losing that job when the company (ChemConnect) bought their competitor, ChemMatch and moved to Houston. We were all left scratching our heads wondering exactly who had purchased who. However, it was fun while it lasted and frought with nice people, free lunches and IPO party's. ( Pinch me - did all that really happen? Did we really squander all that money? )

The next year was spent working contractually for various Silicon Valley based companies and doing some private web design before finally going back to Copporate life for PGP Corporation. I was head hunted while there by Feedster, a blog aggregation company. They were quite persistent and looked promising so I jumped a good ship. After two weeks I was let go when the new VP of Engineering decided he didn't want my skillset. He assured me it was nothing personal. I'm certain it wasn't but it was a huge example of how flippantly that excuse is thrown around. I think Randy Komisar addresses this well in his book, 'The Monk and the Riddle'.

So while some dear friends rescued me from a precarious predicament, I licked my wounds and went back to contracting for the good folk at PGP. Around this time, I decided I was no longer enamored with Engineering and signed up for a Masters Program in Industrial Art at SFSU. In truth, that feeling had been simmering for some years. My contracts at PGP ran dry so moving on I was about to work for NetAppliance when my new school schedule prevented me from taking this job. Luckily, I got a 30 hour/week job in Archimedes, Inc. in downtown SF and that's where I am today. I completed my Masters in Product Design in May 2010.

Today I spend most of my time with my fabulous partner, Sandra. I continue to enjoy Aikido and when my Triumph is not being knocked over outside my apartment by hit and run miscreants, I ride it around the Bay area with a big grin on my face. If I didn't have to work I'd more than likely work anyway - well into the night. I am a night owl.

If I could do one thing knowing I could not fail, I'd create anti-gravity.

That's all for now. but if you've made it this far, you should go get yourself a cocktail - you've earned it!