My Biography

This is the place where I'd be telling you all kinds of interesting things about myself, if I had anything particularly interesting to share. Which I don't. So this lot will have to do instead.

This was revised on January 14^th 2003; this page is prone to being updated infrequently, so please don't take the content as gospel. Please excuse broken links.

Potted history of me

I was born Andrew William Garrard on February 20^th 1974, in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital (Norwich, Norfolk, UK), to Mrs Gwendoline Anne and Mr Charles William Garrard (who prefer to be known as Gwen and Bill respectively).

I was brought up in Eye in Suffolk, going to SS Peter & Paul's Voluntary Aided Primary school in the town. I later went to Norwich School (a.k.a. King Edward VI's School, Norwich), in Coke (pron. "Cook") house.

My eduction continued at the University of Cambridge (UK), Downing College from 1992, where I embarassed myself profusely by getting a third in the final year of the Computer Science Tripos (see my annotated CV). During my time at Cambridge, however, I did meet and fall in love with my fiancée (she is now qualified, and supporting me through my renewed acquaintance with academia), so I didn't completely waste my time. I also enjoyed myself profusely, and third or not learnt a great deal more about computers.

Having left Downing with my Degree (just) in 1995, I was employed for a year at Perihelion Distributed Software, who have since disappeared. However, since I lived in Bath in order to work there, I missed my other half far too much to put up with it any longer, and felt the need to move back to Cambridge to be with her.

I moved to my latest job at Advanced Rendering Technology Ltd. in July 1996, working as a graphics programmer, compiler engineer, and several kinds of dogsbody (more details on my annotated CV).

In September 2001 I left ART, having reached the conclusions that:

I wanted to return to academia, and do a PhD.
I was spending too much time on productionising code - that is, writing unoriginal code which needed to be done, but which wasn't providing any job satisfaction. This caused me to work slowly, which in turn left me feeling unable to request alternative projects. I wanted to break out of the cycle before my brain turned to cheese.
I took myself to SIGGRAPH '99 (and, since, SIGGRAPH 2001), at which I discovered that my brain was still functioning - I had a number of original ideas in the course of a week, and this confirmed for me that I was stagnating at work.
While proud of ART's product, I was far from happy with the quality of the code involved - especially my own (incidentally, I gather that there has been an improvement in practices since I left, so please don't hold this against ART).
There were a number of issues with management, none of which were insurmountable, but which in combination meant that I did not feel happy.
I was able to keep going only by knowing that I was going to leave at some point, so it seemed that it was time to do so.

I went on to do an MSc in "Advanced Computing" at King's College London (at which I got a distinction, which did my confidence some good). I've since been trying to arrange a Ph.D., but sadly the availability of funding and a place have failed to coincide; I will by trying again for autumn 2004, but for now I'm back in the job market. Please contact me if you might be interested in helping me out either with an employment opportunity, or with Ph.D. funding (or a place) in the field of computer graphics - the exact topic of the PhD is flexible, and I'm not too proud to be someone's cheap R&D department.

Interests

My fiancée

My pet cats, Pepsi and Soda.

Computers (mainly using Linux and variants of Unix, and, previously, Acorn computers) - especially graphics, operating systems and compilers.

Rôle playing games (especially AD&D), and science fiction/fantasy novels

The Noble Sport of Tiddlywinks (as a member of CUTwC and ETwA)

ASCII art

Fluppets

Pet hates

All the following are my personal views, and should not be interpreted as fact by anyone with an expensive lawyer

Large organizations who produce inferior software or attempt to force standards without proper consultation, consideration for the rest of the computing world, or pride in their work (Micro$oft, Netscape, Intel...)

Bulk unsolicited commercial email senders/spammers (although the presence of this comment doesn't seem to be getting through to those who say "their research has indicated that I'd be interested in their products").

Attempts to reduce freedom of speech, privacy or the right to a view (e.g. the UK government's RIP bill)

Pollen (I hate hayfever)

Spiders

Bugs

Particularly nerdish details

My Geek Code (now very out of date - Acorn code to follow):

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d- s:+>: a23>24 C++$ UBLAIOSX++++(++)$ P++>++++ L+++$ E+++$ W++@ N
!o !K w--- !O M+ !V PS+ PE Y+(++) PGP++ t+ 5+ X++ R++(+++) tv++ b++(+++)
DI+++ D G++ e++(+++)>++++ h->---(++)() r++ y+(+++)
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

My PGP key:

This PGP key was for use if you email me at work, and will work at home:

Type Bits/KeyID    Date       User ID
pub  1024/71FC5729 1996/12/17 Andrew Garrard

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Version: 2.6.3i

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VykBAS+uA/4uwor8YkLWabA2qLrcbcpw//KoH2lKY6u/Pe3eJfNuSX5DuGAjsWgp
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h1ThN+TNi1Kpm1ESutYaPCXoaOH/i8wq2TmIvrk3Ow1jTFRduq37fA==
=BE7Q
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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