A bit about me

I was born in Singapore with British ex-pat parents. Our family relocated a great deal in the first several years of my life when we lived in Singapore, Malaysian Borneo, England, and three Canadian cities: Kanata, Ontario; Regina, Saskatchewan; and then Victoria, British Columbia. Apart from a six year stint in the Vancouver area, I’ve lived in Greater Victoria on beautiful Vancouver Island for the majority of my life.
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​My lovely wife was my high school sweetheart and we’ve been together ever since. Cora has put up with a great many of my hare-brained schemes, including writing Kelvoo’s Testimonial! Her support has been indispensable and appreciated. 

We have a wonderful daughter who wouldn’t want me to share her name or other personal details, so I’ll just say that she’s all grown up now and enjoying much success in her profession.

When Cora and I married, I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. I worked in sales and wasn’t enjoying myself. Everything changed when we purchased (I may be giving away my age here), a Commodore home computer. I dived into the rabbit hole of programming and I found myself frustrated by the technical jargon in the “how-to” programming books. That’s when I decided to write a short book to lead readers through the process of programming games on a Vic-20 computer, written in plain English. The result was that I got myself hired to create computer games, starting my software development career. I shelved any ideas of being a writer as I managed to build on my career through self-learning and the mentorship of many co-workers, far more skilled than me.
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While programming may seem like an exercise in boredom and isolation to some, it broadened my horizons tremendously as I worked for various organizations, becoming familiar with diverse industries like insurance, banking, forestry, manufacturing, distribution, fisheries and first nations management. My work forced me to keep learning and stay curious. I couldn’t have written Kelvoo’s Testimonial without all of the experiences that came before it.
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I don’t want to give the impression that my life revolves entirely around software development. Cora and I love travel and scuba diving. I started diving at the age of fifteen and Cora and I were scuba instructors for a brief time before we married. Our travels have taken us across Canada including the high arctic, to various parts of the U.S., and to the Caribbean, the South Pacific, the U.K. and France. I also enjoy videography and playing with drones.

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Over ten years ago, I tried to write a sci-fi novel. I can’t remember any of the details of the story except that it was about a scientist who invents an anti-gravity device, which transforms the world with a whole lot of unintended negative consequences. I got about eight pages in, read it back to myself, and thought it was complete rubbish! Looking back, I think I was trying too hard to be an author; making myself use words like “diminutive”, when I could have just used “small”. Thus, my writing career was shelved once again.
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My birthday in January, 2021, led me to picture the lifestyle that I’d like to have down the road when my software development career comes to a close. Once again, a rather romanticized vision of becoming a sci-fi author came into view. On January 30, I opened a new Word document and wrote, “As the morning horizon of the Kuw’baal sky began its timeless transformation from black to grey, I made my way to the algel falls…”, thus starting Kelvoo’s Testimonial.

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